The Wall

“Prose is misleading, though, when it comes to saying what it feels and seems like. The days are the same, with variations in the weather, and the view is the same, with variations in the visibility, and the people on either side of you are the same, so it’s static; it’s not a story, it’s an image which is fixed-with-variations. It’s a poem and as I already said, it’s a concrete poem with a few repeating elements. One would be concrete itself: concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete.”

Joseph’s play on language is an example of metanarrative—narrative that calls attention to its status as a form of storytelling. Here, Joseph is attempting to use language to capture the monotony of the Wall. His comment on people next to him emphasizes how life on the Wall encourages uniformity and anonymity. Joseph uses repetition to create emphasis and urgency.

“A brave man, a family man, a leader, an athlete. A person with a sense of duty and responsibility. A good man to follow into battle. If you had asked me right then and there what was the least likely thing I could think of about the Captain, it would be that he was also, above and beyond any other thing, the biggest fucking liar I’ve ever met.”

Joseph’s description reveals that the Captain is an important mentor to him. At this point in the chronology of the story, Joseph sees the Captain as an exemplary man and Defender. The last line foreshadows Captain’s betrayal of the Defenders. Joseph’s short sentence fragments and repetition—beginning the first three sentences with “A”—creates a lulling rhythm, one that aims to make the reveal in the last line starker.

“We can’t feed and look after all the humans there already are, here and now; the humans who are here and now, most of them, are starving and drowning, dying and desperate; so how dare we make more of them? They aren’t starving and drowning here, in this country, but they are almost everywhere else; so how dare we make more humans to come into this world?”

Joseph rehearses arguments against procreating. His arguments are rooted in an understanding that reproducing in the midst of climate change creates a moral hazard for people in higher-income countries. However, his ability to argue doesn’t prevent him from Breeding with Hifa. He is thus complicit in some of the ethically-harmful givens of society within the Wall.

“There was something abnormal about his implacability. It was easier to understand once you started to think about the things he must have seen, the things he must have done. That day was the last time I cheated or took a shortcut or cut a corner or did anything not one hundred percent by the book. I became Mr. Rules. I realized that even though I was on the Wall, a part of me had been assuming there were still small human margins here and there, room for interpretation, space for forgiveness or acceptance or, less nobly, the chance to talk yourself out of any trouble you might have got yourself into. I now saw that that was wrong. No leeway, no space, nothing but black and white, the rulebook or anarchy, nothing but the Wall and the Others and the always waiting, always expectant, entirely unforgiving sea.”

Although the Wall is a physical structure, it shapes the psychology of the people who live on it and within its bounds. It eclipses all else. In this passage, Joseph realizes that the Captain’s rigid thinking is a direct result of the Wall. Joseph accepts this way of thinking because he admires the Captain.

“Home: it didn’t just seem as if home was a long way away, or a long time ago, it actually felt as if the whole concept of home was strange, a thing you used to believe in, an ideology you’d once been passionate about but had now abandoned. Home: the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Somebody had said that. But once you had spent time on the Wall, you stop believing in the idea that anybody, ever, has no choice but to take you in. Nobody has to take you in. They can choose to, or not.”

Joseph’s sense of home reflects how the Wall impacts the concept of community. In the United Kingdom, building the Wall has changed values so that individuals no longer believe that they have a responsibility to people in need. Lanchester makes the connection between the larger culture and individual experiences; he shows that this notion of home has damaged Joseph’s relationship with his own home and his parents who live there. Again, the narration uses repetition, beginning sentences with “Home:.”

“The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.”

Tension exists between older people and younger ones like Joseph because younger people bear the cost of older generations failing to address climate change. This is a moral hazard, and it is one of the defining ethical issues of cli-fi as a genre.

“We were bored and tired and uncomfortable and anxious, they were angry and frightened and exhausted and desperate. God, the Wall must look like a terrible thing from the sea, a flat malevolent line like a scar. So blank, so remorseless, so implacable. We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here, we would kill them. It was that simple. But—how we must seem to them! We must seem more like devils than human beings. Spirits, embodied essences, of pure malignity. If we would kill them on sight, what would they do to us, if they could? I remember thinking: we don’t owe them anything. I’m glad I’m one of us and not one of them.”

As Joseph has his first (indirect) encounter with the Others out at sea, he has a brief moment of empathy and tries to see things from their perspective. The use of the term “Others” and the training he receives are designed to dehumanize Others so that killing them seems reasonable. Joseph isn’t able to sustain his empathy because of the Defender culture and that of the United Kingdom. Here, the narrative uses polysyndeton, where words are separated by conjunctions, in this case “and”: “We were bored and tired and uncomfortable and anxious, they were angry and frightened and exhausted and desperate.” (Emphasis added.)

“All these people had homes, pay packets, families, hobbies, taxes to pay, things on their mind, TV series to catch up with, heating bills, gardens to plant. I had none of those things; maybe one day I would. At the moment I didn’t particularly want them. It was odd: I wanted to get off the Wall, I wanted this time to be over, yet when I tried to think hard about what would be next, there was a blank.”

Joseph distinguishes between people who are inland and Defenders on the Wall in terms of material abundance. His attitude toward those inland isn’t one of envy, because he is not sure that their abundance is a good thing. This passage also reflects how the Wall renders Joseph incapable of thinking about the future.

“Others, Defenders—what’s the difference? I couldn’t decide if this was the opposite of what it would be like to fight to the death, or a good preparation for it.”

The training exercise is a turning point for Joseph. It inspires Joseph to reflect in more detail about the contest between the Defenders and the Others. Joseph’s identity is in flux as he contemplates the significance of potential conflict with the Others. He questions the difference between the two groups.

“‘It’s fake,’ I said to her afterwards. ‘It’s children playing let’s pretend. Think of it as being like a video game.’

‘I don’t play video games,’ she said, which was true. We sat there for a bit.

‘Let’s pretend…’ she said. ‘I used to like that. Let’s pretend…Grownups don’t do enough let’s pretend.’”

This is one of the first moments when Joseph and Hifa begin to engage with each other. They rely on storytelling and imagination to cope with the psychological toll of learning to be Defenders. Hifa struggles with being a loser in the war games at the training facility, while Joseph adjusts by telling himself a story about the training’s meaning. The benefit of his approach is that it is psychologically protective. The danger is that it prevents him from dealing with the reality of needing to kill Others in order to do his job, and dehumanizes Others.

“‘There are those who see our desire for security, for safety, for peace’—he stretched out his arms in a gesture people often made when they were talking about the Wall, as if the Wall was like a giant pair of outspread arms—'as a selfish desire. A selfish, self-interested turning away from the world. A refusal of our responsibilities. A—well, there’s no point going on. You can’t argue with people who want you to drown, to be overrun, to be washed away. You can’t argue!’”

The politician James delivers a speech filled with platitudes, and demonizes people with ethical qualms about barring climate refugees. He rationalizes the United Kingdom’s stance to the rest of the world, which is struggling with the effects of climate change. His arguments are intended to sidestep the ethical issues created by the Wall; he evokes either-or thinking that ignores the nuances in ethical decision-making.

“Home no longer felt like home. I’d go to college and then what? Hughes wanted to spend his life among books. I didn’t. I quite liked the idea of going and living with some of my new friends […] going off together and finding a new way of living, more communal, not family-based but where we would live together and look after each other, and maybe other like-minded people would join us. We’d maybe live on a farm, we’d maybe have, you know, goats. The kind of thing farm people had. I had to admit that I knew nothing about farming.”

This passage captures Joseph’s alienation. One of the costs of the Wall and being a Defender is lack of connection to others. Here, Joseph tries to imagine what community would look like if people were willing to put aside self-interest. He isn’t able to sustain that vision because society in the United Kingdom hasn’t equipped him for such a life. Absence of connection and community is another effect of the United Kingdom’s response to climate change.

“You may know in general that the nation needs more babies, and you may know that it encourages people to breed, but you don’t know the half of it until you actually set up in business as Breeders yourself […] If you could get used to the thought of bringing another person into the broken world. I can honestly say that the idea had never crossed my mind before Hifa suggested it, and then as soon as she had, I knew I had no choice. It was the closeness of death—that was what did it. We could save ourselves from dying by bringing somebody new into the world. It suddenly seemed like the only thing to do.”

Joseph shifts from ignoring Breeding as an option to accepting it as desirable because of the benefits he and Hifa will gain. His decision-making process shows how the Wall has transformed relationships, making them transactional. Earlier in the novel, he rehearses the ethical argument against reproduction, but he decides to procreate anyway because of the potential benefits. He is complicit in the moral hazards related to climate change, though his decision to procreate also reflects a longing for intimacy.

“Another human being at one’s beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one’s personal property…though of course they are technically the property of the state, there are all sorts of monitorings and safeguards, it isn’t at all like such arrangements in the benighted past, it is a form of providing welfare and shelter and refuge to the wretched of the world—but no, still, I would not have believed you. It is a falling away, a lessening of one’s own humanity. A decline in one’s own standards.”

Hifa’s mother, one of the older generation, explains her rationalization for relying on Help in her home. She aims to allay her sense that having Help is similar to chattel slavery, or slavery in which people are treated as moveable property. Each time she tries to make a distinction between slavery in the past and Help in the present, her argument falls apart. Like many people in her society, she has normalized this new form of enslavement. The system of Help is a key way that society has become dystopian.

“Defenders have a saying: ‘The Wall has no accent.’ It means when you’re standing looking at the water, standing watching for Others, it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s all concretewaterwindsky.”

The saying reflects Defender values, and it is likely supposed to emphasize the egalitarian nature of service. It may also reflect the flattening nature of service on the Wall. Being a Defender encourages conformity, in other words. Joseph goes on to say that there are differences in portions of the Wall, and the Defenders’ sense of how likely they are to be in danger at their new post farther north. There is a mismatch between what Defenders say about who they are and the reality.

“Hope is a mistake.”

Joseph initially has hope that the extraordinary nature of the Others’ second attack will make his command more merciful. He is wrong. For the first time, he understands the problem with the black-and-white nature of ethical decision-making in the world of the Wall—it lacks nuance. As a Defender, he accepted this state of affairs. However, now that he is on the receiving end of an inflexible judgment, he sees the problem. He feels a sense of despair as a result.

“Your worst fear: track it down inside yourself. Take a good look at it. And face the fact that it will happen. The thing you dread most will happen. When it does, the name of the thing you’re feeling is despair.”

Joseph’s impending expulsion from the Wall creates a crisis of identity. Although he has played by the rules and done his best to fulfil his role as a Defender, he is still about to be transformed into an Other. He finds the thought so unbearable that his imagination fails him. His state of mind represents the first psychological step to becoming an Other—he is alienated not only from his former life, but from himself.

“The thing we most despise about you, you people, is your hypocrisy. You push children off a life raft and wish to feel good about yourselves for doing it. OK, fine, if that’s what you want to do, but you can’t expect the people you push off the side of the raft to think the same. To admire your virtue and principle while we drown. So, no, I’m not going to be like you. I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to be a hypocrite, and I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”

This is the Captain’s response when Hifa asks him if he feels guilty about betraying the Defenders. His answer is the clearest statement in the novel of the ethical problems with the United Kingdom’s response to accelerating climate change. The narrative again uses repetition for emphasis: “I’m not going to.”

“I’d been brought up not to think about the Others in terms of where they came from or who they were, to ignore all that—they were just Others. But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren’t Others anymore? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.”

Joseph’s identity is in flux once he is out at sea. On and within the Wall, one of the givens of life is the dehumanization of Others. Once he becomes an Other, Joseph is forced to confront the arbitrary nature of the division between Others and citizens.

“I did not think it would sink us, sink the lifeboat, but I did think it would mean we couldn’t stay together as a collective; the rafts and boats would be scattered over the seas and we would have to look for each other or for a different place of temporary safety. The sensation of despair, which I had been holding at bay ever since we had been put to sea—I suppose because we had been so busy with the work of survival—came back in full force. I was sure the rafts would be forced apart.”

While Joseph spends the first two parts of the novel in relative safety, here he confronts the physical threat of one effect of climate change—violent storms. His worry here is not so much for his physical safety as it is for what will happen to the floating community. His concern over the loss of community shows the importance of a collective to his psychological wellbeing.

“The pirates would leave us with nothing. Why would they do anything else? They were people who killed on sight, just to make a point. The benefit to them of leaving us with enough water and food to sustain ourselves was exactly zero.”

The pirates are driven by pure self-interest—one of several responses to scarcity and climate change. Though an enemy of the United Kingdom, their stance is nearly identical. Joseph is able to understand how they think because of his indoctrination as a Defender.

“Death and sex—close companions.”

Joseph mitigates his despair at being afloat at sea by having sex with Hifa. Both sex and death are rooted in connection and the extinction of individual identity, and they are primal experiences that Lanchester posits as universals of human experience. Joseph is only able to experience sex in this way while at sea. On the Wall, sex came with the added weight of Breeding, which transforms sex into a transaction.

“The rooms were big, with space for at least four people; say twelve in total at the platform. They had sailed off or died in accidents or gone to some other fate. I felt an abstract curiosity and an abstract empathy, and also, at the same time, I didn’t really care. Hifa and I were here and they were somewhere else. We decided to take the room with the view towards the west, to avoid being woken early by the sun. We shifted mattresses around, got a table and chairs, and giddily, unbelievingly, set up our bedroom as if we were children playing house.”

For the first time in his life, Joseph experiences abundance and freedom. The installation where he and Hifa land is different in every way from the spartan life at the Wall and the restrictive, limited life inland. Joseph and Hifa are playing house in the sense that they are creating a life, much like many couples did before the Change. Joseph and Hifa are only able to sustain the fantasy of playing house by ignoring their circumstances. Joseph has reverted to living purely in the present as a survival tactic. His situation with Hifa is rooted in denial, and it replicates what the world did as climate change accelerated.