There is a particular kind of attention that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale asks of its readers, and almost no readers are equipped to give it. The novel is narrated, in first person, by a woman whose name we never learn. She is called Offred, which is not a name but a possession marker. Of…
There is a near-universal cultural shorthand for surveillance, and it has been doing damage for several decades. The shorthand is the telescreen. The device in Orwell’s 1984 that watches Winston while he watches it. The two-way television set on the wall of every Party member’s room, broadcasting propaganda and recording every movement and sound within…
There is a way Lord of the Flies gets taught, and the way is one of the most consistent misreadings in twentieth-century English literature. The teaching runs like this. A group of British schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. They attempt, at first, to organise themselves along civilised lines. They…
There is a quiet fact about the history of dystopian fiction that almost no general reader registers. When people are asked to name the foundational dystopian novel, they say 1984. Sometimes they say Brave New World. Sometimes, if they are more widely read, they say We. These three novels, published in 1949, 1932, and 1924…
There is a particular way Animal Farm gets taught, and the way is wrong in a small but important sense. The book is presented, in secondary schools across the English-speaking world, as a satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution. Napoleon is Stalin. Snowball is Trotsky. Old Major is Lenin or Marx, depending on which teacher…
There is an exercise worth performing before reading any further. Picture, as clearly as you can, the apartments in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. If you have read the novel, you probably picture something. Glass walls. A small room. The narrator at his desk. Maybe a bed. Maybe the suggestion of a corridor outside. Now ask yourself…
There is a particular way Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 gets summarised, and the summary tells you almost nothing about what the novel is doing. The summary runs like this. In a future America, books have been outlawed. The job of firemen, in this future, is not to put out fires but to burn books wherever…
There is a particular way Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower gets praised, and the praise tells you something important about what the novel has not been read for. The book is widely described as prescient. Reviewers point out that Butler, writing in the early 1990s, set the novel in 2024 and 2025, and that…
There is a particular kind of disappointment that some readers feel after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. They have heard the novel is devastating. They have been told it is one of the great novels of the twenty-first century. They sit down to read it and find, on the page, a quiet first-person…
There is a small but consistent pattern in how people talk about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. They remember it as bleak. They remember it as a father and a son walking through a destroyed world. They remember the ash, the cold, the cannibals, the cart, the can of Coke, the ending. They remember it as…