50 pages • 1 hour read
John LanchesterThe Wall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: Anti-Immigration Politics
In The Wall, the United Kingdom responds to waves of climate change refugees by walling off the country from the rest of the world. The Wall is science fiction, but anti-immigrant sentiment plays a role in contemporary European politics, especially in the United Kingdom. Lanchester satirizes anti-immigrant ideology in order to show the natural end of virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric—dystopia.
Calls to exclude or eject immigrants from Europe and the United States have surged since 2015, bringing nationalist, far-right candidates and parties to power (Tanvi, Misra. “The Year in Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric.” Bloomberg. 2015). Politicians who use anti-immigrant rhetoric channel the grievances of people who have paid the cost of globalization, the increasingly international nature of business and capital. According to this rhetoric, perceived surges in crime, a lack of jobs that pay a living wage, erosion of support from safety net programs like the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, tax increases, and the loss of British national identity are all the fault of immigrants.
This rhetoric has had an impact on national and international policies vis-à-vis immigrants. European countries have tightened up their laws to make it harder for people fleeing war in Africa and the Middle East to gain asylum; the comparatively generous treatment of forced immigrants from Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine War indicates that racism and old colonialist ideas about the Middle East and Africa may be at work in immigration policy. In the United Kingdom, anti-immigrant politics served as a potent vehicle for the British exit (Brexit) referendum in 2016, which passed and lead to the country’s departure from the European Union in 2020. The promise of anti-immigration rhetoric is that stopping the flow of immigrants into Western countries will create a better life for citizens.
The Wall is a satire. Lanchester builds a dystopia that shows the harm of anti-immigration rhetoric: A higher-income country cuts itself off from the rest of the world with a physical structure, and the government has the power to kill or enslave immigrants who do manage to make it over the Wall.
The world turns out to be no paradise for the people inside of the Wall either. Joseph Kavanagh feels oppressed by the insularity of his world and despises his parents and politicians for creating a system in which he and most young people have to spend years protecting the Wall. The politician James calls Defenders heroes when they kill forced immigrants, but Joseph is self-aware enough to realize that the real beneficiaries of the Wall are elites who never spend time there. The major message of the book is that taking anti-immigrant rhetoric to its logical end will only make a dim future darker.
Literary Context: Climate Fiction
Cli-fi—climate science fiction—is a genre in which writers speculate about a future or near future in which predicted consequences of climate change become a reality. In The Wall, the reality of climate change informs cultural context, setting, and conflict.
Lanchester delineates the impact of the Wall on the culture and environment of the United Kingdom. The near future in The Wall is a dystopian one, but the protected citizens of the inland have not realized that yet. In his speech to the Defenders, the politician James warns that outside of the United Kingdom, “Change was not an event but a process” (105). The people of the United Kingdom have so far experienced climate change as gradual changes in “sea level and weather” (104). These shifts in the physical environment have already remade the human environment. The inland part of the United Kingdom is a closed society where people hope to avoid the consequences of rising sea levels. They’ve accepted that the shores and beaches of the United Kingdom are things of the past. The country has surrendered its identity as an island nation connected to Europe and Commonwealth countries—many of them former British territories and colonies—for the illusion of safety.
The Wall is more than just a physical setting. Its presence and defense create the worldview of characters like Joseph Kavanagh. The harsh, cold weather makes it impossible to see and interact with others aside from precious time stolen from sleep. The Wall also insidiously reinforces the belief that people on and inside the Wall are deserving of human dignity, but those outside are not. The hypocrisy of the older generation, which did too little to check climate change, destroys relationships between younger people and their parents.
Climate change shapes tension in the novel. Lanchester imagines conflict over the response to climate change on a societal level. The question for politicians like James and collaborators who help others get over the Wall is if the United Kingdom will take the higher-income nations’ responsibility for climate change seriously or instead use its power to hoard resources that only temporarily stave of the devastating effects of climate change. These choices are significant because they will determine the nature of British national identity. The large breach of the Wall that results in Joseph Kavanagh’s exile is a harbinger of the transformation of British people into Others. The Wall is ultimately a novel about the inevitable nature of catastrophic climate change as a reality for everyone.
