If the satire in 84K feels a bit obvious, chalk it up to our living in a painfully obvious time in history. The government has outsourced many (most?) of its functions to The Company, of which there is only one: Take a look at any business in the nation and you’ll find it’s owned by a company that’s owned by a company that’s… Theo Miller — that’s not his real name, it’s just what he calls himself — works at the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the amount people will have to pay for the crimes they’ve committed. If they can’t pay, they go to the patty line, hard labor to make up for the costs their crimes incurred.

When a woman from Theo’s past appears, begging him for information about her long-lost daughter, Lucy, he helps her a little and then wants to stop being involved. He has worked hard to be invisible (Theo Miller isn’t his real name; it was the name of someone who’s dead now), and he has no intention of letting his life fall apart for Dani Cumali, a long-ago friend and maybe more who lives her life on the patty line. But Dani tells him, “Lucy’s your daughter,” and then she’s murdered. The murderer is a hired hand for a subsidiary of the Company. Theo doesn’t think it’s likely that Lucy really is his daughter. But.

84K is far darker than any of Claire North’s other books to date (though as I say, I didn’t finish the one about death), so please take a substantial content warning for child harm, sexual violence, physical violence — you name it. Anyone who can afford to pay the indemnity for a crime can afford to commit the crime, and the wealthy of the world take grim advantage of that fact.

What’s more disturbing, in the present American political moment, is the feeling that none of what Theo does — or anyone does — matters. They can reveal that the Company has dug mass graves for workers on the patty line who died of starvation or illness or unsafe working conditions, but the fact is that everyone already, essentially, knows that to be true. Everyone knows, and nobody knows how to change it. The scope of what Theo wants to do — rescue a girl who may or may not be his daughter — is very small, because small change is the only change that seems possible in this world.

Though 84K is on the long side, its plot zips by, with the ever-present threat of Company violence looming over all of Theo’s detective work. I didn’t love the dude-is-motivated-by-lady’s-death plot here and wished I could read a book about Dani burning down the world instead of Theo; but I will say that all of Theo’s major allies in the fight are women. Dani sets him on the path, a woman called Neila finds him bleeding in the street and helps him recover, and there are several other spoilery women he teams up with later on and unexpectedly. Even so, and even knowing that Theo’s averageness is the point North is making, 84K did play into an existing frustration of mine about stories that insist on celebrating white male mediocrity.

What really shines about 84K is North’s prose. Theo lives in a world that requires its citizens to leave many things unsaid that are known by everyone, and the writing leaves space for things to go unsaid.

At the weekend he has money for drink, or can walk by the river without a card in the world, or take a bicycle out into the countryside and let the sunlight wash away the work, and when he returns to his soft bed

he is better

can work better, do what he needs to do, better, and one day

if he works hard enough, earning through his labours

one day maybe someone else will turn down the duvet in the corner of his bed and someone else will press the smell of cleanliness into his fresh-washed clothes and he need not scrub at dishes and argue with the water company and stand in line for the bus that never comes because these things are fundamentally

not the things he is best at
he can give
so much more to this world
so much more

if he’s just given the opportunity to do it.

This is not an unfair position.

The Company requires this kind of thinking, that jumps from one thought to another while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the human cost of the way one is choosing to live one’s life. As a comparison and to gauge whether this book is for you, North’s writing in 84K reminded me of White Is for Witching, my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books.

Before we go, some stuff: The book knows that both men and women buy sex, but it tends to assume that only women and girls sell or are sold for sex. (Not true.) In a brief flashback section from a trans character’s point of view, North says “Once upon a time Neila was a man called Neil” and uses the wrong-body explanation of transness (here’s Janet Mock on why she doesn’t like this trope).

My biggest issue — surprise, surprise for a dystopian story — has to do with representations of disability. It’s fairly clear that Theo’s is a society that values normative bodies and minds, insofar as it values bodies and minds at all. We see some cases where indemnities for murder are higher if the murdered person belonged to a gym, and lower if the murdered person was disabled, but North doesn’t engage with the stories of any of those people, with the consequence that their tragedies feel like set dressing for the (non-disabled) characters’ efforts and epiphanies.

Towards the end of the book, our protagonist goes to see a badly injured ally in the hospital, and she’s just able to write the word END, instructing him to take her off life support. Though the character’s not exactly saying that a disabled life isn’t worth living — if she lives, she’ll be in the power of her extremely wicked son — the scene is all too resonant of the Bury Your Disabled, Type 3 trope. All in all, it paints a picture of a writer who engaged very very shallowly with disability when envisioning her fictional world.¹

Though her disability rep leaves a lot to be desired, Claire North has managed to write a satire that I didn’t hate — a satire of corporatism, no less! — and created a believably terrifying fictional world. Read it if you wish to be unsettled.

The post Review: 84K, Claire North appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 57

What We’re Reading

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
(also, I watched Ex Machina and it was creepy)
Does Jesus Really Love Me?, Jeff Chu
The Scam, Janet Evanovich
Tricky Twenty-Two, Janet Evanovich
Flip Flop Fly Ball, Craig Robinson

Dystopian Fiction

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
1984, George Orwell
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick (also on Amazon Prime)
Saga, Brian Vaughn and Fiona Staples
Mort(e), Robert Repino (our pal!)
The Scorpion Rules, Erin Bow (READ THIS ONE IT IS GOOD)
Delirium, Lauren Oliver
Matched, Ally Condie
Zone One, Colson Whitehead
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Radio Silence, Alyssa Cole

The Forcening, Part II

The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness

Reading for Next Time

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Song is by Jeff MacDougall

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.57: Dystopian Fiction and the Forcening Continues appeared first on Reading the End.

The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight ‘em if you want ‘em): It’s not clear why, but the book ends with two of the factions in ruins and both of Tris’s parents dead in her defense. Evidently the test administrator wasn’t lying about the danger of being Divergent. And Tris has a kissy thing going on with someone called Tobias, who I guess I haven’t met yet. Or wait, I bet that is her instructor’s real name. Cool.

The whole: I coined the term process dystopia for a reason, my friends, and the reason is books like this where I cannot get my brain to jump the track of being completely baffled by how the world got this way. And when? And like–how? Dystopian fiction origin stories are a tricky beast. Plus, the day-to-day workings of the adult world in this book were unclear to me. What’s the norm that the Nefarious Plot Tris uncovers is supposed to be disrupting?

There is also a very weird antipathy for the Erudite throughout the book that puzzles and annoys me. Do you think Veronica Roth conceived a grudge against Ravenclaw during the whole Cho Chang episode, and this is how she’s paying them back? By making their equivalent in her world nasty awful schemers? Because, okay, Tris uncovers a nefarious plot by some Erudite folks, and the plotters have an extremely valid gripe. They do not like it that the Abnegation faction controls the whole government. Lack of representation in the government is a fair gripe. Indeed that is the whole reason MY NATION EXISTS. But then they come up with this insane and violent plan that proves how ultimately unreasonable they are, and it sort of makes their gripe with the government seem inherently insane and violent. Which I don’t think it is! At all!

(Why it would be as if in a vibrantly diverse country of 320 million people only the rich white men got to run everything!)

On the up side, I do like how angry and tough Tris is, and how this is something that makes her love interest like her. There are moments when the book seems to be making Tris out to be the specialest snowflake in all of special land (endemic peril of YA dystopias these days!), but mostly not. She’s flawed and scared and pissed, and I like all of that. The book is engaging and readable, despite flaws. Despite flaws I enjoyed it and felt like reading the second one (which I then did) (and it was fine).

I read this at my aunt and uncle’s when I should have been reading Book Club Book. But that one was pretty slow-moving, and Divergent was pretty fast-moving, and it was all sunny in a hammock, so you can see how I ended up reading this and Insurgent before finishing Book Club Book.

The post Divergent, Veronica Roth appeared first on Reading the End.

I don’t know, y’all. I know that authors make up their own titles, but I wish someone at Random House had proposed an alternate title, and I wish the cover design team had designed a different cover. The Age of Miracles is sort of chilling, and the title and cover make it look like it’s going to be kind of heartwarming, but then you’re like, No, it’s probably too literary to be heartwarming, so maybe it’s one of those sort of very sad suburban desperation novels.

If that’s what you’ve been thinking, good news: FALSE! It’s much more like the adult version of Susan Beth Pfefffer’s Life as We Knew It. Except not obviously more adult. And not as scary. Look, I don’t even know what the distinctions are. Why is this not young adult and the Pfeffer series is? What is happening in this world?

Here’s what happening in the world of The Age of Miracles: The earth’s rotation has slowed down. Suddenly the days are forty-five minutes longer. Then ninety minutes. After a while, each day lasts for 72 hours. Nobody knows why this is happening or how to make it stop. Birds fall from the sky. Gravity weighs more heavily on everybody, so sports don’t function the same way they used to. Some people — it’s not clear why those people and not others — come down with a mysterious collection of symptoms they call, for lack of a better term, gravity sickness. With no idea of what to do, the government institutes “clock time”, which means that everyone will keep living on the same schedules they’ve always kept, no matter what the sun is doing in the sky. As all of this is happening, thirteen-year-old Julia is growing up, nursing a crush on a boy at her school, going to piano lessons, watching her parents argue.

I loved about The Age of Miracles that the world was perpetually on the verge of unlivable disaster, and it never quite came. The changes to the world are ominous because they seem to portend disaster, and as that degree of catastrophe fails and fails to materialize, the situation becomes more tense, not less. The characters adapt and carry on with their lives, but the reader knows that worse must be coming. Sometimes the characters seem to know this too — the protagonist’s mother stocks up on canned foods and stores them in the back against the day that groceries are no longer available — and sometimes they are too occupied trying to find some semblance of normalcy to pay attention to what’s coming.

I shall now coin the term process dystopia, which I doubt I’ll ever need to use again because it’s such a rare category of dystopian book. Ordinarily — I said this when I was reviewing The Uninvited — the dystopian novel begins long after the Events. You hear about them in narration, or else sometimes in flashback, and that’s your glimpse into how the world shifted from our normal to the protagonist’s. The Age of Miracles gives it to you piece by piece, every step of the process of building the new normal: First they don’t notice, then nobody knows what the hell to do, then it’s clock time, then people who won’t keep clock time are treated with suspicion, then birds are dropping dead on your porch every day. And so forth.

So I like this. I like a process dystopia. I like watching people inspect their circumstances and figure out how to behave in ever-changing circumstances so that they can have some semblance of routine and normalcy. I like this because I am a person to whom routine is stupendously important. In particular, I liked how the world’s testing of its new rules — clock time? let’s give it a try! — paralleled the process you go through in adolescence of testing the rules of adulthood, figuring out where you fit into it, establishing what is normal and right for yourself. Julia is navigating both of these things simultaneously, and it makes for fascinating reading.

Disregard the title and cover of this book! It’s all bad marketing. Embrace the process dystopia! If you are still reluctant, I’ll add that this is a very very quick read. I read the whole thing on two subway rides: home from work after borrowing this from the Enthusiast, and back to work the following morning.

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