The Wall by John Lanchester
We have a flat affect narration of a guard who’s serving on wall duty in a future version of England, now enclosed by a high, wide coastal wall (it made me think of the walls I’d build for Age of Empires). He’s on a two year duty of two weeks on, two weeks off civil service. The wall must be protected from the Others, anyone not already part of the UK, and any others who are able to get over all the wall, must be […]
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
I picked up the wall (second hand, of course) knowing nothing about it, other than it featured a humanity-ending catastrophe and potato propagation. Which in hindsight is an accurate, if not underselling, summary. I’m finding my mind fixated on adaptation lately. The earth is heating, the oceans are rising, the rain is refusing to fall. My environmental preoccupations, which I’ve struggled to push to the back of my mind since first learning of the hole in the ozone layer as a child, are no longer […]
