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.
Themes
Ethics in a Time of Climate Change and Scarcity
Decision-making in the world of the Wall is rife with moral hazard; one party engages in a risky or harmful behavior, knowing that another party will have to bear the consequences of that behavior. The moral hazards Lanchester explores in The Wall are related to who has to pay the cost for climate change.
Lanchester uses the conflict between Joseph Kavanagh and his parents to show that the Change is the result of a moral hazard: The consequences of older adults not acting to rectify climate change are borne by people like Kavanagh. Kavanagh describes the atmosphere of guilt and anger that poisons his relationship with his parents. When parents make arguments from experience, the response of the Joseph Kavanaghs of the world is to say: “Why don’t you travel back in time and un-fuckup the world and then travel back here and maybe then we can talk” (54). Kavanagh and his generation reject the moral authority of their parents’ generation. To add insult to injury, people who are the age of Kavanagh’s parents are too old to serve as border defense, leaving young people to pay with their lives for the consequences of previous generations’ inaction.
The people who are inside the Wall also carry a moral hazard. People inside of the Wall take their sense of safety inland for granted. Rich people inland are able to buy their way out of service, which creates little incentive to create conditions that will lessen the impact of climate change or mandatory border defense. They benefit from a much higher standard of living because of the enslaved population. The only path to legal immigration is by becoming “Help,” the euphemistic term for the exploitation of climate refugees, who can work but cannot become citizens.
The dichotomy between Breeders and people who choose not to reproduce also grows out of a moral hazard. Joseph recognizes this when he questions the privileges that come with creating children, given that an overly-large population can be part of the reason for climate change. Making more people guard the Wall is moral hazard incarnate: The society inside of the Wall reproduces itself, knowing that the cost will be borne by future generations.
The greatest moral hazard is the harm and inequity created by the United Kingdom walling itself off from the rest of the world. It is policy to kill climate refugees who are dealing with the long-term consequences of the carbon released by higher-income countries in the past and present. The politician James articulates the self-serving argument for walling off the United Kingdom, attacking British citizens who help climate refugees enter the country. He calls their actions “wickedness” and describes them as “deluded,” “so wrong, so morally lost, so ethically destitute” (107). His talk is a defense against the obvious critique of the Wall as an abandonment of responsibility to the global community of nations, including faiths that require caring for strangers and the destitute. Moral hazard has so injured the politician’s ability to think through the ethics of the Wall that he sees people with different opinions about responses to climate change as a kind of internal Other.
The novel suggests that everyone will bear the consequences of inaction on climate change— it is just a matter of how soon payment of those consequences will come. James and Defenders like Kavanagh ultimately find themselves outside the Wall, certain that greater and greater waves of climate change refugees will breach.
Fear and Otherness
A dichotomy exists between British and Other, with the British as protected citizens and the Other being demonized. Fearing climate refugees is fundamental to the identity of Defenders and British citizens. When Joseph becomes a Defender, he goes from becoming a beneficiary of the Wall to being an active participant in its defense. He unquestioningly accepts the righteousness of maintaining the Wall because the belief in limited resources is so embedded into British culture and is almost invisible to him.
Joseph works on the Wall, where he prepares to kill Others but mostly does not see them. He experiences fear of them. Fearing Others is a key part of indoctrinating new Defenders, who learn early on that surviving an attack isn’t the only thing they need to be afraid of. A breach in which Others come across the Wall leads to being exiled to the sea and likely death, because the ocean has been a great unknown since the building of the Wall.
The only Other with whom the narrator is familiar is the Captain, a mentor who has privileges that Joseph wants for himself, and the person who demands the strictest adherence to Defender regulations. Joseph could take the Captain’s success as a challenge to the binary between Other and British. Instead, he smooths over his disquiet by seeing the Captain as a man whose strictness is “abnormal” and whose survival and success on the British side of the Wall makes him more fit—in the evolutionary sense—than the many Others who do not survive the ocean. The Captain’s wholesale embrace of his role as a Defender convinces Joseph that there truly is “nothing but black and white, the rulebook or anarchy, nothing but the Wall and the Others” (46).
During the training exercise, Joseph gets the chance to play at being the Other. Losing out to the other training team causes a shift in his thinking about the difference between Other and British. Because of the arbitrary nature of the training exercise, Joseph is left with a disturbing thought: "Others, Defenders—what’s the difference?” (90).
Being an Other seems to be contagious. When Joseph and his peers leave the Wall and go inland for leave, the civilians around them are fearful of them or even avoid being in the same public transportation with them. The Defenders feed this fear by violating behavioral norms as they curse or drink to excess. That shared alienation draws Joseph closer to his fellow Defenders, and it makes a place for the alienation he has always felt from adults like his parents, who oversaw the collapse of the climate. The narrator and his fellow citizens also experience a fear of contagion when the politician James, using the language of morality and nationalism, tells them that there are those in Britain who aid the Others.
The pivot in how Joseph sees Others comes when his company fails to stop an armed assault of Others. Losing his identity as a British citizen happens through a series of steps that ritualize Joseph’s ejection. The meeting where his judges deliver his foregone sentence and the salutes of the Defenders who put Joseph and his companions out to sea blunt the reality of what it means to be an Other, despair and a painful death. Joseph calls his time on the life raft “amniotic,” rendering the sea a place of rebirth in which a Defender and British citizen becomes an Other.
At sea, the narrator learns that the term “Other” covers a multitude of differences—generous survivors like Kellan and Mara, violent exploiters like the pirates who attack the floating community, and profoundly-damaged people like the hermit. The Wall begins and ends with the same line, a choice that collapses the difference between Others and people who have the protection of the Wall.
The Importance of Community
Joseph Kavanagh experiences multiple forms of community and solidarity that shape his identity. As a Defender, he is united in a common purpose with other Defenders, including those in his company and outside of it. The monotonous and dangerous life on the Wall creates opportunities for bonding over harsh living conditions and poor food.
When Joseph goes inland, he deals with the alienation of being on the Wall by connecting with his fellow Defenders. He also experiences solidarity with former Defenders who understand what it means to hold the Wall. Having community and common experiences helps Joseph and the other Defenders deal with the physical and psychological tolls of their service, especially their fear of dying or being put out to sea.
It is only after getting to know his fellow Defenders better that Joseph realizes that the community he has found can be suffocating and alienating in its own right. Joseph sees Hughes doing Tai chi and realizes that the “bulky, looming, whiskery figure [he] usually met trudging down the Wall in twilight […] was a skinny, gentle intellectual who did meditative martial arts and read Romantic poetry and wanted to be an academic” (70-71).
Becoming a Defender requires conformity and hiding the parts of oneself that are not useful for survival on the Wall. Joseph dreams about an alternative version of life on the Wall—life after the Wall, one in which he and his Defender peers might create 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” (113). The values of this imagined community run directly counter to the values of Great Britain, which is built on selfishness and not looking after Others.
Outside of the Wall, Joseph gets a closer look at what it means to engage in a community not built on selfishness. The floating community is one built on people contributing what they can for the greater good. Joseph finds purpose and meaning in his work as a diver; in the context of this community, he is able to strengthen his relationship with Hifa. Alone, individual members of the floating community would not be able to survive. Together, they share knowledge and material that literally enables them to ride out the storms on the sea.
The ending of the novel challenges the idea that being a part of a community is enough to protect people against crisis and disaster. When the pirates attack, Joseph and Hifa are able to survive because they have been a little selfish in keeping the cache of food and water hidden from the others. Escaping the floating community prevents them from burning to death. The hermit also survives by being a little selfish. He rejects climate refugees who may be too large in number for the stores on the installation to support. The message of the novel is that survival depends upon balancing the needs of community and the needs of individuals.
