Dystopian novel about a barren, cynical society
By May Schack
Hanne Richardt Beck’s novel portrays a post-catastrophe society fighting with the after-effects of huge climatic disasters and a massive stream of refugees. The date is 2034 and the place is known as the Northern Region. It consists of districts where the well-to-do live and then 7 South East, where the maladjusted or unfortunate scrape an anarchical existence.
This world of the future is governed by the Consistent Democratic Party, the brutality of which is camouflaged in newspeak. Their values are based on TbiM – The best in Mankind. They maintain that mankind is equipped with an internal tuning fork that distinguishes between right and wrong. Their slogan is “we take care of you”. Primarily, they keep an eye on people. And the control regime has now completely taken over the individual person.
The two main characters in the novel are the young woman schoolteacher, My, who struggles to teach, i.e. to standardise, the children in accordance with all the many precepts, and the model refugee Samuel, who, as a doctor, has been allowed to immigrate and now plays a role as a politician. But it is impossible for him to see through the power and, as in the case of My, veil after veil is torn from his face.
With great imaginative power, Hanne Richardt Beck creates a fictitious universe right from its very foundations, rather in the style of Margaret Atwood’s dystopias, which are also based on concern for our world and the way in which it is developing.
What do we do with a world destroyed by climate in which floods of refugees try to get in through the doors of the rich, and where many people are already marginalised in the ruined outlying districts? Beck provides neither answers nor solutions, but she portrays the brutal Gleichschaltung and the division of people into the competent and the incompetent. A lifeless future scenario in which people are afraid of each other and scared of diverging even the slightest bit in their behaviour. A place where you constantly have to show that you deserve to live and in which all emotions must, as the phrase has it, be “adjusted”. And in which a terrible psychological control, enforced by both new technology and psychological means, is applied in the supervision of each single individual.
The main thrust of the novel is the picture of what it means to live in a society in which people are no longer able or permitted to be themselves.
Translated by Glyn Jones
