Christopher Priest contemplates acts of violence.

Gollancz, PPB £14.99

There’s a general principle of book reviewing, set out originally by, I believe, Cyril Connolly. He advised reviewers that they should write for the reader when reviewing a book they like, but if they dislike it they should address the author instead. This creates a distinction between a public recommendation, which pleases the author and possibly makes readers interested, and a more personal discourse intended for the author, but which is likely to be discouraging and disappointing. Worse, although it is addressed to the author, and he or she will hope everyone else will lose interest and drift away, it is also in public, or in semi-public.

Well then, Mr Wallace, what are we to say to each other in this semi-public place?

You are already alerted to some of what follows, but let’s dive in. It is of course your first novel, and a set of protocols immediately apply. First novels are traditionally given a gentle ride by reviewers. Maybe those protocols have been abandoned in these days of free-wheeling internet abuse from anonymous and anonymous’s dog? I still feel bound by them, if only to a certain extent. You no doubt know that I am a colleague of yours, a fellow writer, and so I too once had a first novel out. I enjoyed the cushioning effect of those protocols, even though from the vantage point of some four-and-a-half decades I might reflect that perhaps I got away with quite a lot back then. Would I have benefited more from a thoroughgoing kicking from my elders and betters? We’ll never know. There were a few mild warning noises in those now elderly reviews, and several phrases of cautious encouragement (which of course I lapped up but soon forgot, as you do). A good and well-deserved duffing up might have been more memorable, and in the end more useful.

So let’s stay with the protocols and start with a few words of praise for Barricade, which maybe you’ll see nervously as a preliminary to something worse. There’s no avoiding that.

Your story and its background have a refreshingly callous quality – life is cheap in the world of the Barricades. A new form of intelligent life has emerged, the ‘Ficials’, genetically enhanced human derivatives. Although vulnerable to nausea, pain and injury, they are capable of being healed and restored by a swarm of implanted nanobots, rendering them more or less indestructible in a long and apparently never-ending battle for supremacy with the “Reals” - the remnants of normal humanity. The setting is Great Britain, the time is unstated. Things are pretty bad all over the world: there are hints of poisonous clouds, threats from unshielded radiation, horrific and disgusting diseases which have sprung up to affect the humans, and in general life has become violent and cheap. A taxi driver named Kenstibec is given the job of driving a photojournalist called Starvie from Edinburgh to London. They are both Ficials, and they are in an armed and armoured Land Rover, which is called a Landy. The armour is made of the impermeable compound known as Gronts Alloy.

(An interjection. What sort of a name is “Kenstibec”? It doesn’t seem to have any obvious etymology. And what on earth is ‘Gronts’? I reluctantly assume the latter is an anagram of ‘strong’ and the character’s name disentangles to ‘Steinbeck’. For a moment I wondered if there was a clue here, a mad reference perhaps to The Grapes of Wrath, the famous road novel, a journey from one hellish landscape to another. Then I thought not.)

Your story begins. Kenstibec and Starvie journey south through a hellish landscape, fighting and killing Reals as becomes necessary (which is regularly and often). They capture a Real called Fatty, who eventually, and grudgingly, becomes an ally of Kenstibec. Starvie, who has been fashioned to resemble a sex-goddess named Jennifer E, turns out to be an enemy of the Ficial cause, and is later revealed to be the Queen of a local autocrat called the King. In a scene like something out of Mad Max 2, she unleashes a deadly weapon against Kenstibec and Fatty, who nevertheless make it in the end to London (or at least to Brixton), although by then they are both in a bad physical state. This main story is interleaved with a number of shorter passages, printed in italics, which appear to fill in some of Kenstibec’s background.

I hope I have this right, or nearly right – I found your narrative confusing and elliptical, because it is repeatedly interested in distracting side issues. The dialogue is often flippant, the physical descriptions hasty. However, when you concentrate on telling the story things aren’t too bad, although your plainspeak tends to reveal a lack of genuinely imagined or fresh images. Much of the book reads like an inverse zombie novel: the engineered Ficials are the normals, while the Reals, who appear to spend their days wandering around in groups and attacking the Ficials, are of course the substitute zombies. I assume this was intended to be funny or paradoxical? It is in fact neither.

The story is grim, consisting of an apparently endless sequence of violent acts, with a studied lack of interest in the consequences of violence. The novel is full of bashings, shootings, bombings, mutilations, woundings. In this violent age of ours, in which films routinely depict many similar acts, and of which there is much more and much worse in many console games, we the readers, the audiences, are becoming fairly immune to such scenes. Either we take them for granted and are unmoved by them, or in some cases we seek more and worse graphic action to satisfy appetites already numbed by lesser scenes. Writing plausibly and well about violence these days is difficult. Like all descriptive writing it requires skill, discrimination and originality.

Here’s a typical piece of your writing about violence (from pages 108-109):

Fatty threw himself on the nearest Real, jabbing the knife straight into his gut. For a second the others froze. I took the opportunity to grab the nearest guy’s neck in my good right hand. I squeezed hard, meeting my thumb and fingers in his windpipe. He looked me in the eye, full of questions, until I found his spine and twisted. He dropped to the ground. The third sentry levelled his gun at me and got off a shot, which missed. I grabbed the rifle, pushed the muzzle up into his chin, and forced his finger back on the trigger, blowing his head almost clean off. Fatty pulled the knife out of his victim’s belly and swung it across the fourth guy’s ankles. He shrieked in pain and tumbled onto Fatty. I stamped on the neck of the first guy, who was still gurgling and reaching for his pistol. Then, just as the fourth managed to jam the muzzle of his gun into Fatty’s face, I kicked him sharp in the head, and he fell down, unconscious.

This is a tired, pointless passage, a dull description of an unbelievable fight. It lacks story, characters, pain. There is not even an impression of action or a sense of danger. Look at those verbs you have chosen: “threw”, “froze”, “grab”, “squeezed”, “looked”, “twisted”, “dropped”, “levelled”, “got”. They are the familiar first-thought choices of a hack writer, speedily typing words, filling up a page. Surely you should be aiming higher than that?

This sort of passage raises the whole general question of the need to include descriptions of violence in fiction, and if violence is included how that should be written. Since your entire novel is pitched at action, damage, destruction, cruelty, injuries, don’t you think you should be confronting the question in a serious way?

Your writing is often inattentive and imprecise. In a single paragraph on page 90 you tell us that some buildings were “untouched”, but then contradict this by describing a roof “shorn away”, a sign hanging “at a dangerous angle”, a car park “littered with wrecks”, a truck “half melted” into the tarmac. There’s a huge fire blazing away at the back. Eight pages later you do it again, in a similar contradictory passage about contamination.

There’s also a distinctly dodgy passage in the middle of the book, when the unappealing Fatty and the unemotional Kenstibec plan to send a compliant Starvie out as a sexual lure for a gang of randy Reals. “Listen,” Fatty says to Starvie, after he has bound her wrists with plastic cuffs, “I know you’re upset about having to go whoring, but no more of your looks, okay?” Her response is to tilt her head, and say sweetly, “You don’t like the way I look at you?” Soon the Real sentries are predictably drooling over her, as only men can do when a shackled sex goddess is dragged past. The sequence goes on in the same lacklustre way for several inconsequential pages. The whole of this scene seems likely to start an argument I don’t want to get drawn into, but I think when your book has been read by a few more people you might well be.

In case you are thinking otherwise, I was not scouring the text for these solecisms, setting out to set you up, but like all people who are preparing a review I was keeping notes throughout the reading. The protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter. I kept noting all the bad stuff (much more than reported here), but I was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you. I found none. It gradually dawned on me that I was wasting my time. Barricade was unyielding in its awfulness. It was a book I did not wish to write about.

You are spared the rest.

Christopher Priest

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