The Wall

A Novel

By: John Lanchester

Narrated by: Will Poulter

The best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital returns with a chilling fable for our time.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall - an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding captain and sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life....

John Lanchester - acclaimed as "an elegant and wonderfully witty writer" (New York Times) and "a writer of rare intelligence" (Los Angeles Times) - has crafted a taut, hypnotic novel of a broken world and what might be found when all is lost. The Wall blends the most compelling issues of our time - rising waters, rising fear, rising political division - into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.

©2019 Orlando Books Limited (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Quick but enjoyable

Compelling story that kept me engaged. I would recommend. I’ll certainly now look for other works by this author.

Magnificent world-building

Extraordinary world-building in this tale of what could be a near future, if sea-level rise leads to war. The writing is spare and muscular. Lancaster focuses on only a few details, but the details he selects create a vivid picture of human adaptability. We carry our biases and conflicts into every world, but we also carry forward a fundamental human need for connection and community. Lancaster paints two monotonous worlds where living is rigorously simple- on a wall overlooking the sea, and on the open sea. Yet neither of these monotonous worlds bore the reader; there's always a new discovery around each corner of this narrative, and a quiet tension that pulls the reader forward. Highly recommend.

Narrator Will Poulter is a perfect fit for this narrative.

A dystopian book?

Dystopian fiction is most of the times so far away from current reality. The book describes a nightmarish world that is so nightmarishly close. Excellent book with challenging notions throughout.

Thrilling

It was easy to get into, exciting and thrilling all the way through. Well read.

Slow start sneaks up on you and whispers truth

Politics aside, the ideas expressed here are done so quietly and profoundly. it took me a while to grasp that the Defenders on The Wall are probably muss 17 and up with the oldest, the Captain, probably no more than 24.

The idea that the sins of the parents are the burden of the children is handled realistically. The interaction between the young soldiers is also realistic as is the reaction of the public to the Defenders and vice versa.

Recommended to fans of Margaret Atwood, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Doris Lessong and Mary Doria Russell.

it is cold wall

The Wall,” arrives at a moment in which the definition of a wall is a matter of national debate, and it actively invites such associations. As the main character says on the first page, as he searches for words to describe the wall of the title, “You look for metaphors.”
The narrator is a young man with the Kafkaesque name of Joseph Kavanagh. He has just arrived at the Wall, “a long low concrete monster” that runs for thousands of kilometers around the periphery of an unnamed island nation, closing it off completely from the outside world. All citizens are required to serve there for two years as Defenders, forming the last line of resistance against the threat of an armed invasion. This recalls the Night’s Watch of “Game of Thrones,” except that the country is recognizably Britain, and the enemies on the other side aren’t supernatural White Walkers, but human beings in rowboats and dinghies.

A Climate Crisis Viewpoint

This is an odd, but fascinating novel. The author never quite says it's about the climate crisis. The wall is supposed to keep our "the others" but they are never called climate refugees. Late in the novel, the reader learns that the wall originally was built to keep out rising seas. As a result, it's a rather powerful climate novel. It's major drawback is it's lack of emotion and lack of strong central characters. But it's an enjoyable book, and the reader is very good. The world needs more climate crisis novels. This is a pretty good one. It's not a great one but it's a pretty good one

One of my all time favorites

I loved this story! It's a haunting and beautiful coming of age story. In a dystopian world there is love and hope but also wind and cold and dark water. It's a story that has stuck in my head, like a memory. Would make a wonder film. Narrator was perfect. Highly recommend.

It's OK

Some spoilers ahead, I'm afraid.

The start is quite a slog. I understand the literary tool of setting a mood by drawing the minutia and monotony in excruciating detail, and I cannot deny it works. I just don't like it as a tool. Perhaps it is used here to contrast life's three regions: within, on, and outside the wall. As I can identify that as a possibility, the tool must work, a bit, at least, but the tone never changes. The story is only ever related in the same flat and pointless manner. Our protagonist only cares about getting off the Wall, but the thought of it seems not to give him any actual hope. So everything is grey, everything is a waste of time and effort.

I feel Lanchester misses a great opportunity to investigate society and human nature when he simply skips what could have been an incredibly interesting tension between those who choose to have and those who choose not to have children. In the story, the ones who have no children just find those who do a bit odd, and nothing more is said on the matter. I simply don't buy it. A Great Britain surrounded by a large wall would run into population trouble fast, as is hinted at in the story. And under pressure, humanity tends not to work all that well. There is no way society would not become this awkward, potentially violent mess where childless people consider themselves morally superior to those who make babies, while the "breeders" think they are the more responsible for the future. By and large, we love to hate what we love, and the distinction between having and not having children in a world suffering significant ecological collapse is not likely to be exempt from this.

Chewy, the protagonist, is boring as a single, regular, dusty, red brick. Maybe there's a small crack in the brick, but it's not large enough to explore. I mean, he has nothing more to say about the world after everything went to shit than that he hates the previous generation (like so many generations before him), and that he looks forward till military service is over? He has a lucid moment where he reflects on treason towards the end, but that's about it for any individuality and thought.

I'm not going to say it was a waste of time to listen to The Wall, but I also do not feel like I leave it having become better in some way, or that I have been shown interesting art or philosophy. Not everything needs to be that, though, and the narration is great at capturing the mood, serving the story up in as good a dressing as can be. For my part, I am glad to put it down, and look forward to more interesting fare ahead.

A Slice of Future Time

A tightly woven, incredibly poignant, vision of what future generations may plausibly experience. At base, humans default to in-/out-group behavior, shown so vividly here. Listen to it in
conjunction with The Inhospirable Earth for an additional kick to start truly caring for this precious orb.