"Ideology obscures the real conditions of existence by presenting partial truths. It is a set of omissions, gaps rather than lies, smoothing over contradictions, appearing to provide answers to questions which in practice it evades, and masquerading as coherence in the interests of the social relations generated by and necessary to the reproduction of the existing mode of production."
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice (New Accents) (p. 48). Taylor & Francis.
A quick note. I wrote this in a hurry to get it out before the Clarke Award shortlist announcement, alongside my Clarke reading roundup. I didn’t read (all) the positive reviews before writing but I have now. This book, as far as I can tell is universally loved. One of the things I find the most difficult about people is their inability (?) to question their ideas, beliefs, their critical faculties, their sense of self. I try to reconsider and question continually, once to such a degree that it felt like I was questioning everything I’ve ever known. So I know I am capable of revising my ideas. Not this time however: I feel like I’m reading a different text - a sincere but simplistic and irresponsible novel. What follows is probably, unfortunately, not going to win any hearts and minds - it’s angry, snarky and a little bit contemptuous. I should probably rewrite it or at least write more, in a more comradely fashion. I might. One version of that would have to include some rereading of novels I admire, some very large novels like The Ministry for the Future and The Deluge in part to see whether I’m being harsher on Swift’s novel than I was on those and others, but maybe there’s a shorter version because really I just want to read Namwali Serpell’s book on Toni Morrison, the new Gwendoline Riley and The End of Everything.
I almost didn't write this - I haven't written for ages and feeling so negative about something felt wrong. I was also very aware of the dedication and acknowledgments in the novel. Then, going forward, I tried writing it in different ways, mainly because I wanted to cut out the snark - I have failed. I don't want to seem contemptuous of a text that clearly inspires love, tenderness and hope but nor do I want to hide my anger and exasperation. I haven't read any of the universally positive reviews mainly because I try to read most texts first without reading reviews - I'm a skip to the last paragraph to gauge the general tenor kind of guy - and secondly my tendency is to argue with the praise or criticism as much as I argue with the text. I've had to write it fast - I had a very limited time before the Clarke shortlist is/was announced - so their are parts, with added time, I would add to and finesse. It contains spoilers and it assumes you've read the book. I'm going to use a kind of journal form to take you though my reading experience.
The first hundred or so pages of Wolves combines the emotional impact of Up's early minutes with the promise of every SF novel that has used Roadside Picnic and, or Stalker to get us excited. And trust me I was not immune. A young activist inspired by Greta Thunberg AND taken on their first demo by a member of their family. And that was after after the death of Lucy's grandad. My dad died two years ago so the death of her grandad hit hard. Secondly I didn't become an activist until I was in my mid twenties when I was volunteering with a disabled man to help him live independently. By the greatest serendipity - I had no choice over where I was placed - he was involved in the disability rights movement. He went to a variety of meetings, usually monthly or bimonthly, to lobby for change within Birmingham council so I got to see the hard, never ending work of persuasion, frustration, failure, occasional success and trying again. He also took me on my first demo and I happily handcuffed him to a bus. I was political however from a young age. My dad, though in no way an activist, was Old Labour and hated the Tories. He was raised as a Baptist but by the time I was 7 or 8 he was beginning to question not just his faith but everything. This intersected with his depression, so my early lessons were: live day by day and question everything. My first political awakening was The Falklands war so at 11/12 I was questioning war and nationalism: pointless, horrific, stupid. At 14 I was making white poppies with a friend. And maybe that is why Lucy's relationship with her gran also hit hard. How I wish they'd been a Greta Thunberg in 1982. How I wish one of my family would have taken me to my first demonstration. It's fair to say these first hundred pages triggered a lot of emotions: sadness, happiness, euphoria and jealousy to name just a few.
On the first page, Lucy's parents are introduced. I thought it was a bit odd:
"More than anything – and quite apart from the virus – they wished for me to grow up and become an asset they could flaunt. They yearned for the future; for the top-grade GCSE results, the driving test passed first time, not this unfortunate stage of childhood, so messy and grubby and insatiable for knowledge no parent could ever possess, only the internet, and the internet was dangerous – creeps lived there. They had no time for me."
I've met too many middle class parents who, given a wish, would eagerly choose their child's school preference or a new 4x4 over world peace, but Lucy's one-tone parents are like wicked stepparents in a fable: indeed, my readerly spider senses immediately thought 'fairy tale vibes! Let's see if there's more...'. I acknowledged it and carried on.
There's a lovely quote on P81 that attests to the thoughtfulness of the novel, as Lucy reflects: "That kind of relationship belonged in a different era, one that had stability, and continuity. What could you promise another person now?" Sad, bittersweet, totally relatable. On the same page: "In the UK, we were finally getting proportional representation: Labour had been forced into a coalition with the Lib Dems in 2029 and this time the Lib Dems had held firm and an independent committee was working through procedural reforms ahead of the 2033 election. Pundits said it would be a rainbow government. The Greens were on the rise." I was in London doing my nurse training when the big demonstrations took place against the Iraq war. I was organising in college, in my hospital when on placement and within my community. Led by Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dems were considerably left of Labour and I met many brilliant Lib Dem members and supporters as we built the anti-war movement and the demos. I was also, curiously, with a group of Lib Dems when Phillip Lee defected from the Conservatives. They were jubilant. Now my class hatred is such that I can't imagine passing the time of day with a Tory MP let alone sharing a political party but Lee, as I'm sure you know was a pretty unpleasant bigot, quelle surprise, especially terrible on LGBTQ+ rights, and various activists left the Lib Dems because of it. I write this because, of course, people and organisations change and, more importantly, you can't generalise about anything from personal experience. Instead I'd just ask you to remember Jo Swinson and the record of the Lib Dems in their coalition government. What this novel cannot recognise is that it's not just organised fascists or Reform, or the Conservatives that might oversee the UK's journey into 1984, but that a Labour/Lib Dem government, on current trajectories, is more than capable of it too. Here I should say that I admire Swift for trying to put politics into her novel. I genuinely don't want to downplay the bravery of it. It's much easier to like and enjoy other novels that don't attempt it and I happily admit to being initially seduced by novels that contain their own reactionary absences. Anyway back to the story, even though I don't really believe any good would come from such a coalition, it is at least in realm of possibility and pressure from the left facing Greens could make it interesting. I moved on again.
To P99 (still in 2030) and to the subject of university. All I needed here was a mild acknowledgment that the changes in further education in the UK since the 70s and 80s have been significant. I would say drastic and perilous of course, after all it's not just those ridiculous humanities departments that are getting scrapped but Science departments (!) too, not to mention the pressure on working class families to cope with the debt or the multifaceted pressures on staff: no sense that universities are changing swiftly and irrevocably or that many are complicit in the everyday violence of capitalism. I would call my feelings at this point as mild disappointment: I rationalised that a relatively short text can't caveat or mention everything though Swift is efficient at peppering the text with significant details, from failing harvests (118) to the break up of the USA (157). On reflection, knowing what's to come, I think it's part of a larger picture of absences that signify a dismissal of working class lives and a dangerously superficial acceptance of the durability of our institutions. You might call it faith or optimism.
If you make it to the end of this you'll probably think that I hated When There Are Wolves Again but there is sharp, evocative writing throughout. Here's Lucy thinking about the heat:
"We muttered phrases to each other that had lost any real meaning – like an oven out here, like a sauna, a bloody barbecue – because it was more than the physical assault of the heat, it was the way it bent and distorted thoughts, loosening your grasp on reality, shifting things out of shape. I thought of the monster, its indecipherable limbs reaching up to pluck swifts from the blue. A bus whooshing past became colossal, like a spaceship. Parked cars squatted on the side street, their gleaming carapaces appearing to melt into the tarmac. An overhanging tree had dropped its entire canopy." (128)
Unfortunately what follows, a kind of multi-pronged attack on my sanity, is the section that meant I could no longer take the book seriously. Here the reader encounters the Nazi, the King and the dead gran. I thought I'd suddenly started reading an Eastenders script.
First, is it not enough that fascists want to intern, deport or murder black and brown people? Is it not enough that they would happily beat me or murder me for being a socialist, a trade unionist and (usually) the wokest guy in the room? You can see where I'm going with this I'm sure because no, fascists are cruel to their pets too. Evil knows no bounds. But maybe you're thinking we should caricature Nazis? Unfortunately this is just another way that the text denies the complexity of what is actually going on in the world. I don't want to get into definitions, this is already going to be way too long, but I'll suggest that we don't yet have a fascist regime anywhere in the world to compare with 1930s Germany and Italy. I'll suggest that there are individual fascists and fascist tendencies within certain governments, especially India, Israel and the US; the quickly shifting sands of South America are difficult to pin down, but probably there too. It is not yet fascism that is threatening life on Earth through recurring economic crisis, growing inequality, war and climate catastrophe. We are stuck, for the short to mid term at least, in a recurring pattern, with the right growing but unable to get their shit together or appear sane for long enough. When they fail centrists gain power, with little enthusiasm from the populace, because everyone knows they have nothing to offer except dull, bureaucratic and technocratic waffle: more of the same in a political system, dominated by lobbyists and bought by the tech bros, big business and our media overlords. The rhetoric and hateful propaganda of the right carries on whoever is in power and when the centrists disappoint, the Nationalists get another crack. I'm sure you know this even if you don't agree with my delivery. Is it possible we will get full blown fascist states? Absolutely, but the Nationalist Right and the dead-eyed centrists are leading us to catastrophe just as effectively.
The text does not mention the words nationalism or populism at all, it mentions class once, when Lucy describes her parents as middle-class, it mentions unions once - the farmers unions. The word work (works, working) is used 102 times and is largely confined to Hester's artistic work, field work and farming work. To suggest that the novel is a middle class medium is kind of obvious but Wolves is, in the most stark fashion, a work of liberalism that barely recognises solidarity (used twice in Hester chapters about the farming community) and doesn't engage with working class life. I don't take for granted the revolutionary potential of the working class or retain faith in unions any more but I don't think they can be disregarded either. The world is not going to be won by small groups of activists, however well networked.
The depiction of Lucy's pluck in this episode is also kind of stupid. She wants to land the first punch, of course she does: we love Lucy. My experience of long years of antifascist organising is that Nazis are usually bigger than you and they like fighting a lot more. Not always of course but the key is generally to try to make sure you campaign in your communities and workplaces to oppose them and outnumber them. When you outnumber them and they are either running away or being protected by the police, well, THAT is the time to caricature them. So maybe the reader does admire Lucy, I'm all for punching fascists, but know that in the novel, in this encounter, the reader is being fed another fairy tale.
Briefly, the king's death bed benificence. This is never going to happen. On the Pyramid of Evil the royal family lie one level below the US military Industrial Complex, the IDF, the tech bros and Rupert Murdoch, one level above Margaret Hodge and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even if, by some miracle the king wanted to do it, the British state would never allow it. This is not the same as understanding that institutions of the ruling class or governments will make huge mistakes or that events will spiral out of their control. They will and that's when you need communities, trade unionists, activists and organisations ready to intercede and call for action. I recommend reading If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. It's a book about the mass demonstrations that characterised 2010-2020. He interviews activists around the world to try and asks for their lessons and learnings, of the rise and fall of movements and of defeat.
The death of Lucy's gran is ALL the drama the reader needed. A life-threatening and catastrophic heatwave and the death of Helen. That would have been plenty.
Now back to the fascists, but briefly this time and I'll take in all the remaining episodes of the unfortunate Britannia1412, aka The Terminator. The fascists reappear in the farming protest of 2040. The Albion Party has "secured representation in the rainbow parliament for the first time in 2037 scooping up the disaffected and left behind" (142). Later Hester walks around and hears "snatches of Spanish accents, a reminder of the refugee influx after the 2035 heat dome that devoured western Europe" (143). Hester has an encounter discussing binaries and respect and hears that people feel "Abandoned. Forgotten. Collateral". Then we get the Albion Party speech, by none other than the pet hater, which ends with "We're being cleansed" (151). In Hester's mind this is "the party of savages who only care for themselves". And then the symbolic melodrama of the tractor careening out of control. Swift identifies that the social fabric of society is falling apart. However, again, Swift seems to be equating the fascist threat with Nationalist threat which dominates now: I don't know whether she believes this is a kind of shorthand? Or whether she really doesn't take seriously the threat of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Farage and all the similar figures around the world. Whatever you think, the idea that these people, or their fascist descendants in 2040, are "scooping up the disaffected and left behind" is inane. The idea of a refugee influx is not too far behind in the inanity stakes. And clearly politicians are happy to make those kinds of speeches right here, right now. Why did Swift choose a small fascist organisation as a threat rather than a vast network of right wing forces? Why is Britannia1412 such a laughable, recurring figure: he comes back with a gun and then he's an arsonist! The violence in the this novel is cartoonish. It all acts to downplay the threats we need to understand and confront with planning, strategy and tactics: instead we get something symbolic, something manageable, with a demonic face.
Back to the king. Oh no, the rest of the royal family disagree and challenge his wishes. What will we do? We'll rely on the judiciary, that's what. Liberalism has given us good things but I reckon laws are their crowning achievement. International laws and national laws to protect people's rights. Yes, obviously, calls for better laws have been influenced by strikes and movements from the left, but not always. You can recognise that the US and Israel have flaunted numerous international laws since WW2 and I'm sure you'll think of many other examples but most will agree to their centrality and importance. Nonetheless you've probably encountered at least one leftist in your life who warns regularly against the over reliance on, or trust in, the judiciary to do the right thing for the furthering of progressive ideals. This, genuinely, would be a great topic for SF writers to take seriously. The world is currently a judicial battleground and progressive forces are, for the most part, losing. Again I'm sure most of you reading this are aware: investigate the attack on trans rights, on women's rights, on immigrants rights, read up on the Filton Six or the Filton 25 cases, read up on the judgements of courts in the US. Anyway, without the support of a mass movement putting serious pressure on the government, the judges and the whole system, the victory of the case in Wolves is just another aspect of the fantasy. Wolves presents us with a world where institutions are robust and trustworthy. They're not, and its going to be one long painstaking, heartbreaking fight to preserve the status quo, let alone fight for anything progressive.
Let's drop in again on Lucy's parents (169) or maybe not, because I genuinely believe they are cringeworthy caricatures. Then the novel does, to its credit, show the vicious media attacks on the activists and their families but it still assumes that they would have managed to keep the camp and keep protesting. Does anything you've witnessed or maybe experienced in the last 18 months allow you to believe this is possible without much larger numbers getting involved? Just consider the attacks on Zach Polankski (and they're only just getting started) or the clampdown on protesters.
At about page 200 I stopped. I figured I could come back to it in a week feeling less angry and try to be more objective. That's what I did. I managed to enjoy some of the nature writing. With the Mars landing stuff I don't want to rehash familiar arguments, just that, for the next couple of decades at least, the wonder of space travel will be irrevocably tainted by the projects of Musk and Bezos: vanity and distraction. I appreciated Lucy going to a council meeting though obviously I couldn't stop thinking about all the Reform councilors up and down the country bringing their flags, anthems, prayers and small-mindedness to the council chambers. Rereading other parts made me appreciate that the text could, at least, include the idea of a People's Assembly. And then I thought of Land and Freedom - of the fifteen minute debate over land collectivization at the heart of the film, I thought of Matewan, I thought of Le Guin, I thought of Marge Piercy, I thought of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, all because I really do hope that SF writers can find ways to write about people getting organised and how they can find ways to stay resilient in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope they're not afraid to imagine some of the directions the struggle might take.
Maybe someone will argue that Swift couldn't have known or predicted the events of the last three years. If that's you, you need to work harder because it's all out in the open, being analysed and written about, and the anti-protest laws have been in the works for years. The only thing I don't think anyone will have predicted is the prescription of Palestine Action. I will repeat my admiration for Swift's bravery in trying to include politics at all. Circular Motion, as well as being the dullest book of the year - I can't remember being so bored by a cast of characters in my life - manages to ignore the last 20 years of politics, of borders, immigration and hate in a book where everyone is crossing borders all the time!. Susanna Kwan's Awake in the Floating City, a book I kind of loved (read Maura Krause's brilliant review here), can only mention emigration away from the flooded US as "relocation": again no wish to think about borders, immigration and nationalism as the defining features of our era. I could on and on about similar examples in other books.
I will go on to read the work that connects Swift's novel to hope. Is it just because it shows a vision of Britain surviving with resilience and adaptation? The symbolic and literal hope of the wolves? I don't understand how a text with so many absences and such a glib trust in our failing institutions can be a source of hope: in my original StoryGraph review I called it "A crass, cosy and romantic liberal fantasy about two middle class loners who are ridiculously easy to romanticise. It's content to create caricatures of fascists but can't imagine working class activists or the frightening complexities of the nationalist right. The text acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting back a recognisable, artistic middle class activism without the hard and unflashy work of building trust in communities and in workplaces: organising food banks or collecting money for striking workers or being imprisoned for protesting. It acts to suppress contradictions and to naturalise and reproduce the familiar. It's a wild misrepresentation of what is happening in the UK and around the world" I still think that's about right. What does it mean that the the UK SF community are elevating and championing such a text?
I listen to Beethoven or Mozart, Schubert and Brahms when I really need to connect with and feel a faith in humanity. I also find hope in the growth of the Green Party, I find hope in any act of solidarity and in spending time with young people. I'm not sure I expect it from literature but maybe it's time to think about it more, again.
