Tag Archives: dystopian

Review- The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

I’d been meaning to read this one for awhile, as I had heard only good things. Ogawa’s story lived up to the hype. It’s actually not a new book, having been published in 1994. That being said, it was only recently translated into English.

Firstly, the premise of the novel is incredibly inventive. The main character, a young novelist, lives on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast where things just… disappear. Ribbons, candies, emeralds, etc. They simply vanish from the minds of the inhabitants and from the physical world. The memory police ensure that no one is holding on to anything that has disappeared. It is the surveillance state to an extreme.

Ogawa’s prose is quiet and subtle, basking in the subtext of what is left unsaid. I finished it in a single night, as I couldn’t put it down. The book is moody, atmospheric, and contemplative, but without getting ensnared in the melodramatic. It situates itself firmly in a dystopian realm of repression, but there is a novelty to the story that shirks the typical trappings of the genre.

People describe it as ‘orwellian’ but I have never been able to finish 1984. And trust me, I’ve tried on several occasions. This story felt more relatable than 1984. Perhaps because I imagined her to be close to my age, perhaps because of the dreaminess of the prose. The Memory Police has a subtlety that 1984 has always lacked for me.

Some recommend Ogawa for fans of Murakami’s work. In my mind, this feels like an odd comparison as all I can think of them having in common is the flair for magical realism and the fact that they are both Japanese. And don’t get me wrong, I love Murakami, I just don’t think that the two are comparable. The sensation of reading Murakami always feels to me massively disorienting, a little absurd, a little manic. But this was more subtle and gentler, yet still distinct in its own way. It still imparted that feeling of being a little mixed up, the taste of something bittersweet left long after its conclusion.

Review- A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

At first, I found myself disinterested in this book by virtue of its title. I generally don’t take an interest in anything remotely related to religion or Christianity, but after reading the premise of Millet’s book, I was intrigued.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects, to me, creative writer that I am, was the use of the first-person plural. It’s a tact that many don’t take and it is difficult to execute well, but its use, coupled with the premise of the story, is unrelentingly engaging.

Friends from college bring their children to a sprawling house by the sea for the summer, locking up the cell phones and tablets, and essentially leaving a group of eight-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds to their own devices whilst they carouse in drunken, drug-induced hedonism. The children, sleeping all together in the attic, find ways to pass the time and govern themselves, trying to avoid the adults as much as possible. The parents, negligent and vaguely aware of their children’s antics, proceed business as usual while their offspring find themselves increasingly horrified by their guardians’ behavior. And then, sh*t hits the fan. Enter apocalypse.

While the story sometimes drips with biblical imagery and allusion to its tales, I did not find it in the least off-putting. Millet approaches it with an ironic air of the bemused observer. Her jaded narrator, Eve, is pragmatic, mature and fiercely protective of her intrepid younger brother.

In the ways that art imitates life, our fiction begins to take on the climate crisis. Millet masterfully manipulates the end-of-the-world archetype into a pleasing and novel form, playing on the excess and contempt of the wealthy (or relatively so) and their children, left to clean up a mess they never asked for. Millet’s story at times borders on the absurd, yet remains amusing for the duration.

At the end of the day, this is a novel that never takes itself too seriously yet still grapples with the troubling themes. Eerily prophetic, it speaks to the anxiety of the times, another cautionary tale of the warming planet.