Dystopia is all around us: The new generation of dystopian fiction

Dystopian fiction has been a dominant force in publishing for a long time now, most recently hitting big with The Hunger Games. Series like that one have paved the way for huge numbers of popular books with dystopian themes: Moira Young’s Blood Red Road and Teri Terry’s Slated to name but two.

Recently I read In Darkness, by Nick Lake. In Darkness is set in a world ravaged by political unrest and ruled by famine and poverty, where children eat cakes made of mud and water to stave off their hunger, babies are routinely abandoned in rubbish heaps because they’re one mouth too many and young children are swept up into gangs, learning how to handle a gun before they’ve hit their teenage years.

This is a book that has all of the elements that have made dystopian fiction so popular: a world like ours but with some differences, a cast of well-drawn characters, changing allegiances, misplaced trust, a world full of terror and threats and no way for the main character to understand it all, let alone escape it.

In Darkness is set in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

There is no need here for the building of imaginary worlds. There is no need for the author to construct false threat or terror, and the fear the main character feels is all too real.

And yet, to me, it reads like dystopian fiction, perhaps because the world inside this book is so different from the one in which I find myself on a day-to-day basis. I know about, but am not familiar with, a world of starving and abandoned children, where to be twelve years old is to be a man or a woman, and help isn’t a word often used.

It’s a dark, disturbing, brilliant book, and one I struggled to read. The knowledge that the world Lake describes is not just real, but now, is horrifying. After all, reading a book doesn’t involve finding out about a world, it involves experiencing it: what is contained between the covers becomes unavoidable in a way that hearing items on the news or reading about the facts in newspapers isn't.

It reminded me of another book I read recently: Room, by Emma Donoghue. I say read – I didn’t get very far. I found it too dark, but like In Darkness, it is written with a subtleness that betrays its reality. For me, though, the knowledge that Room was set in the here and now proved too much in this case.

(For those who don’t know Room, it’s a book about a Ma and her five year-old son Jack, who live in one room, visited only by Old Nick, the man who abducted and continually abuses Ma, and what happens when Jack finds out that there is a world outside his four walls.) These are books that remind you of stories you hear in the news every now and then, those that make you cry for what people are capable of.

To me, the here and now seems a new, more terrifying dystopia. It’s a scary, scary world out there at the moment, and these books serve as a reminder that everything we find disturbing about dystopian fiction is far more gentle and fightable than the real world.

I'm sure adult readers as well as teenage ones would find In Darkness an enthralling and gutsy book, even if the effect of it is somewhat sobering.


Note: Just before posting, I found this review of In Darkness written by Patrick Ness. It's worth a read.

Concept, concept, concept - A marketing dream, a reader's minefield

Concept in fiction has always been the Thing To Do, and recent children's book offerings are no different.

Boy finds out he's a wizard.
Young girl finds out she can read characters out of books.
Girl meets vampire.
Girl then meets werewolf.
Girl battles against other vampires with help of her vampire and werewolves, enters into an abusive relationship and nearly sacrifices herself in the process.

You get the idea.

Apologies - I seem to have burned every copy of Twilight in my house... Weird.

But these are all fantasy books (apologies to anyone still waiting for their letter from Hogwarts), and so a high-concept idea is both expected and necessary, and part of enjoying a good fantasy is that you accept the concept for what it is and read on. These stories demand a concept.

What is somewhat disturbing is the recent proliferation of high-concept in realistic fiction. I recently read a book I had been looking forward to for ages, only to find that it had obviously been published and sold based on its concept alone - a combination of the writing and editing made the book unreadable. Great concept, terrible book. I won't name names here, but in my mind, countless recent books fall into this category. Sometimes the concept has failed by page ten, sometimes it's only when you get to the halfway point that it starts to flag.

Code Name Verity and Room - two examples of great concepts that create great books

Forcing a high concept idea onto a good story has got to be the easiest way to ruin it. Don't get me wrong - a good concept can take a story from alright to fantastic in zero to sixty. Take Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, for example. Concept: girl has agreed to write down everything she knows about the British Intelligence effort after being captured in Nazi-occupied France. The majority of the book is written from her perspective as she is handed piece of paper after piece of paper to write it down on. Difficult to pull off, perhaps, but in this case it's handled with incredible skill, and personally I didn't question it once. Recent successes in publishing for adults Room by Emma Donoghue (mother and son who live their lives within the confines of a locked room) and Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson (woman whose memory resets every time she falls asleep) are other good examples.

The trouble comes when a high concept isn't necessary. If it isn't necessary, then all it does is force a story to behave. It locks everything within tramlines, cutting off any ability to wander, explore and, ultimately, amaze. You know where the book is going, because there is only one place it could ever go - the other end of the line. No disruptions, no surprises. Concepts are only good when they allow a story to be told that couldn't be otherwise. Code Name Verity wouldn't work if the reader was allowed to see everything - it only works if we are forced to look through the window provided to us by the concept. Same goes for Room and Before I Go To Sleep.

Melvin Burgess, Phil Earle, Keith Gray and Dave Cousins - no concept necessary!

So what's wrong with a straightforwardly-told story, if that's all the story needs? Why does everything need to have its concept? It might sell one book, but it won't have people coming back for books two, three and four. I'm not sure if the trend is one carried by writers or publishers, but the best books I've read in the last couple of years have been low-tech - no high concept, no story being forced to stay within the tramlines.

Stories should allow the reader to explore - how can they do that if they aren't exploring anything themselves?

Morris Gleitzman: Everybody deserves to have something good in their life

After moving house (twice) and going away on holiday (sadly just the once), I can finally get back to the blog, which seems to have become covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.

However, all that time away from blogging has given me one thing: time to read, which means I've been able to reach for books that will cheer me up, make me smile, lift my sunken spirit. Instead, I've been reading Morris Gleitzman. And a lot of it.

Morris Gleitzman is like my Star Wars. Instead of "You've never seen Star Wars?" I get "You've never read a Morris Gleitzman?" (Actually, I get both - I've also never seen Star Wars. Hey. Stop judging. It looks like someone strung some tin cans together, gave a guy a voice distorter and hey presto: R2-D2.)

So a few weeks ago, I bought my first Gleitzman. I then bought my second, third, fourth and fifth. (I am now the person walking around saying "You've never read a Morris Gleitzman?" to total strangers.) The three I started with were Once, Then and Now. I could say that they're all about a boy called Felix and his experiences during WWII, but that sounds dull and dusty, and it's not really what they're about at all. 

What Gleitzman, like the very best writers, does, is make the reader part of the story. Considering that these books are all written in first person from the perspectives of young children, that's quite something. The thing that is so brilliant here is that it isn't the acts of WWII that are shocking - I am, quite disturbingly, used to reading about, or watching, Nazis taking control and other people suffering. What is so brilliant in these books and what makes them different, though, is the window through which you experience this. Gleitzman sticks so fervently to his main character Felix's innocent and trusting point of view, that you can't help but live the story with him.

In Once, for example, when a group of men in armbands arrive at the orphange Felix has been hidden in and start burning books, Felix says, "I get it. Mother Minka was complaining to us library monitors only last week that the library was very messy and needed a tidy-up. She must have got sick of waiting for us to do it and called in professional librarians in professional librarian armbands."

For Felix, everything is a story. It takes him some time to come to grips with what is going on around him. He doesn't understand who the Nazis are or what they are doing or why, but he tries to justify and explain everything he sees. Why are those people naked? They must be hot. Why are those people dead? They must have annoyed the librarians.

In the sequel, Then, Felix is on the run with his friend, Zelda. They are trying to find new parents, and are eventually taken in. I can't tell you anything more than that about the plot, because it will give too much away! But I can say that it runs along the same lines as Once - Felix is growing up, but that doesn't mean that making sense of the mad world he finds himself part of is any easier.

Now is rather different. Felix is grown up, and his grand-daughter Zelda is staying with him. Zelda has her own problems - bullies, accidentally setting fire to things and giving her grandfather birthday presents that seem to upset him. Zelda doesn't understand a lot of things, but she does come to understand that there are reasons why her grandfather behaves the way he does, even if she doesn't fully understand the reasons themselves.



Once, Now and Then share many things in common. They are all tales of friendship and family. They are all stories about stories, and what happens when stories aren't enough. They are all heartbreaking and haunting.

I recommend them all. And a healthy supply of tissues.

Picture That - Illustration in fiction for older readers

This week, I found this lovely YA book sitting on my doormat...

Why We Broke Up, by Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman

Inside, it looks something like this...

(Apologies for the rather dark pictures!)

Right now, I'm sitting on my sofa, wishing and hoping (and thinking and praying, if Dusty Springfield has anything to do with it) that illustration is making something of a come back.

Last month, Patrick Ness and Jim Kay won the Carnegie/Greenaway double for their book 'A Monster Calls'. It's a genius book, if you haven't read it, intwining words and pictures in a way that means neither would have quite the same impact without the other. It's the first time that the awards have been won by contributors to the same book - an acknowledgement, perhaps, that in this case, written story and drawn story exist as one thing.

A Monster Calls, where words meet illustration in a book for teens

So here's my question - when did illustrations stop being a necessary element of a good story?

Growing up, stories are all about pictures - the images act as a vehicle for understanding the words. Without the pictures, the story wouldn't be the same, but more importantly, it wouldn't be understood. (For me, life at that age was all about Janet & Allen Ahlberg.)

Why is that not the same for books for older readers? Why has it become something we associate only with books for younger children? Even Dickens had Cruikshank! Incidentally, the prevalence of illustrations in Why We Broke Up means a tumblr page is practically a prerequisite!

The use of illustration can be extremely powerful. Take this example from 'The Book Thief', for example. There aren't many illustrations in the book, and these particular ones appear in a section called 'Pages from the Basement'. They are the musings of a man who is hiding from the Nazis in the book thief's basement.

In Carlos Ruiz Zafon's 'The Midnight Palace' (originally published as an adult novel, but published here as YA), photographs are used to give a more visual sense of the book's Indian setting.

I don't know of too many recent books for older readers that use illustration to enhance the story. I've just been pointed in the direction of Cathy Brett, a writer-illustrator of books for teens, but I'm certainly interested in finding more - illustrations add such a fantastic dimension. They really can be an integral part of the story.

Cathy Brett's Scarlett Dedd - I can't wait to get stuck into this one!

So really that leaves me with just a few last words...

More, please, MORE!

What is YA for? Code Name Verity - a world reflected

I was going to blog this weekend on YA fiction in general, and what makes YA distinct from adult fiction. Then I read Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and I started thinking harder about the purpose of fiction for younger people. Just as I was coming to the end of writing this post, I also read this nice post from Celia Rees on the same topic.

Aside from being a brutally honest, funny, gutsy book, for me personally, Code Name Verity does something else: it highlights some of the many, many ways in which YA fiction can, at times, beat adult fiction out of the water without so much as strapping on a life jacket.

Code Name Verity is historical YA. It's the story of two unlikely best friends, set in Nazi-occupied France, and is told from the point of view of a young Resistance agent who has been taken captive by the Gestapo.

And yet the one thing a YA must absolutely do, is connect with teenagers now. It must be about something, or someone, that young people can relate to. Code Name Verity manages exactly that, with room to spare - for all of the historical correctness present here, there is something remarkably modern about it. 

The main character, who refers to herself in her writings as 'Queenie', is ballsy, reckless even. But she also hurts. She is heart broken at everything she has lost, and heart broken at having had it all in the first place. She's terrified, and not because she's been tortured and lives in fear of death or worse, but because she doesn't know what's around the corner. She's in the dark (often quite literally), her future on the line, because she has taken a huge gamble: she has agreed to tell everything she knows about the British war effort in exchange for time, because knowledge is the only thing she has left to bargain with, and time is the only thing the Gestapo are willing to give. Queenie is strong, but she doesn't always know what to do with her strength, or how to deal with the aftermath of using it. She makes mistakes, and isn't able to correct for them.

Those feelings  - of helplessness, of being forced to bargain when you have very little to offer, and the certainty that your life belongs, at least for the moment, in other people's hands - are very familiar ones. They are virtually the hallmarks of being a teenager.

But teenage readers, of course, need other things too - exactly the same things that any other reader looks for. Complexity,  depth, something to challenge and provoke. When reading a book about lives during WWII, particularly the lives of younger people, there are expected hardships. Resources were scarce, lives were lived in fear, death and torture were prevalent, and human nature was tested and stretched as far as it can go. A good novel explores these things.

A great novel, however, holds up a mirror, and tries to show what's on both sides. The intricacies, the subtleties, the waxing and waning of possibility. 

Through both Queenie's and her best friend Maddie's voices, this is precisely what Wein does. She shows the other side of the mirror, however cracked it might be. Through Queenie, Wein forces us, from the corners of our eyes, to look at the Gestapo interrogators, to see their pasts, their futures, their own hardships and deepest wishes. We are forced to face the full spectrum of humanity each person holds within them, and the way in which circumstances can so easily define who we are. 

As a teenager, it's very easy to judge the world around you, hate it even. Having the ability, patience and willingness to see through to the other side of the mirror is an incredible thing, and what fantastic books do is show that that ability is worth fighting for with everything you have, even if what you have is very little. I think the true importance of YA books like Code Name Verity is that they show the possibility for humanity and worth of self, no matter who you are, no matter how old you are.

So does YA fiction have a purpose? You bet your teenage years it does.

Boys will be Boys - Four of the top guys in contemporary YA fiction

Let's face it: a lot of the recent big commercial YA fiction has been written by women. The ones you hear about in the news, I mean. The ones that turn up at the cinema. Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Moira Young. What are the boys doing while all this is going on?

Writing some genius fiction, that's what.

When you step into the world of contemporary realism - gritty, honest books - you find that guys own a HUGE chunk of the limelight. Seeing as I blogged a few weeks ago on my favourite kick-ass girls, I thought it was about time I ventured into the world of boys! (Read into that what you will...)

So just for you, here are some of my favourite books written about guys, by guys.

Melvin Burgess, Phil Earle, Keith Gray and Dave Cousins - Masters of contemporary YA

1 Kill All Enemies, by Melvin Burgess. Melvin Burgess is a God amongst contemporary YA authors. He's a flipping genius - one of those authors most people know of, but haven't always read. (If you haven't read any of his books before, go and find one, even if it means stealing one from the nearest stranger.) Kill All Enemies is his most recent, and I loved it. The story is told by three characters: Rob, Chris and Billie. They're all stuck in various cycles, carrying them further away from the people they'd like to be and the lives they'd like to have. Burgess never goes easy on anybody. He throws stuff at these guys until you are gasping for breath at their fortitude and, well, balls. At the same time, he has a certain knack for pinpointing the humanity in everybody. People just like these characters exist - they're out there, fighting against the rest of the world, and that thought is terrifying - something Burgess isn't afraid to play on.

"Isn't it amazing how just thinking something can change your whole life? That's what a miracle is. Not flashing lights and choirs of angels and people coming back to life. It can happen in a moment and no one would ever know but the person it's happening to."

2 Being Billy, by Phil Earle.  I was given this for review, and it quickly (like, within about 20 pages) became one of my favourite debuts of 2011. Make no mistake, this is an AWESOME book. There's something unbelievably stark about this novel - you can't escape the hell that has become Billy's life. He hates it, and the worse it gets, the harder he fights. And boy, does he know it. You sense right from page one that Billy is just waiting for someone to offer to save him, but you also sense that as soon as they do, Billy will fight them all the way. Considering that Earle doesn't pull back from the tough stuff, he is capable of absolutely pummelling you with emotion. Every time Billy talks to his twin brother and sister, you want to leap right in, scoop the lot of them up and put them somewhere the world can't reach them any more. Surely even the most manly of manly men will be cuddled up with the kleenex by the end?

"My arm was sore. But, to be honest, everything aches after a restraint. Not just your muscles either, your brain, your guts, everything. It's difficult to explain. You feel lopsided, out of kilter, just wrong."

3 Ostrich Boys, by Keith Gray. I don't know what it is about Keith Gray. Every time I pick up one of his books, I get sucked in before I know what's happening. Ostrich Boys opens with Blake, Kenny and Sim hiding in a garden with a can of spray paint, desperate to do the right thing by their best friend Ross, who died after being hit by a car. They're angry - his funeral was depressing, not fit for Ross at all. So the three boys make a plan: they'll take Ross to Ross, and so begins the sort of adventure you'd expect when 3 teenage boys embark on a 250 mile journey carrying an urn full of ashes. There are a lot of surprises along the way, though. Blake, for a start, isn't your typical main character. He's seriously overweight and uncomfortable with himself, but he's brilliant, and as much as he puts himself down, you hope he isn't too far from seeing just how brilliant he really is.

"Our best friend Ross was ash in a jar. Ross was dead. Kenny, Sim and I were learning to live with it."

4 15 Days Without a Head, by Dave Cousins. Small confession. I got a review copy of this late last year (it was officially published earlier this year), and soon afterwards went on to meet Dave Cousins at a conference. If you are reading this, Dave, I apologise. I gushed. This book is GENIUS. I love it. I envy it. More than anything, I wish it had been around when I was a teenager. Fifteen Days is the incredibly well-told story of fifteen year-old Laurence and his little brother Jay (who thinks he's a dog), and the day their mum doesn't return home after work. They're left to fend for themselves - or rather, Laurence is left to fend for the both of them. This is a funny, genuine, heart-breaking window into the life of a modern teenager, and you won't want to put it down. Ever. (As a small side-note, the introduction to Laurence and Jay's mum is one of the best character intros I've read - seriously! I recently found myself surrounded by writers for a weekend, and that character intro is all we were talking about. Well, that and cake.)

"By the time I get to school, the playground is empty. I've missed registration and assembly has started, so I have to go to the office and sign the Late Book. I make it back just in time to join the queue lining up for first period - out of breath and sweating like a kebab."

It's summer - go and treat yourself to a new book! (Disclaimer: the sun was still shining when I wrote this. It may now, in fact, be chucking it down. In which case, go treat yourself to a new book.)

I'll Be There - A new perspective in contemporary YA fiction

It isn't very often that you come across something that feels entirely fresh and unfazed by the market. So, when those moments come along, you treasure them. Last week I was lucky enough to have Holly Goldberg Sloan's I'll Be There recommended to me, and it didn't take long for me to realise I wasn't going to be able to put it down any time soon.

I'll Be There is a love story, hidden deep in the folds of a family drama, and reading it really does feel like you are discovering something entirely brave and new. The story revolves around Emily and Sam, two teenagers who meet one day at a church. Emily's father has forced her into singing a solo, and she's dreading it - the only thing she is confident about it that she has a horrible singing voice. Hearing the pipe organ playing from the street, Sam walks into the same church, and takes a seat in the very back row.

From here, chance encounters and decisions made in the moment forge a path down which Emily and Sam are guided. This is a book written from an eagle-eye perspective, swooping down on character after character, each providing a small piece of the puzzle, from Sam's younger brother, Riddle, to his dangerously unhinged father, including along the way a black bear, a cattle driver and a hotel cleaning lady. Every character is observed in beautiful, subtle detail. Take Riddle, for example. Riddle is autistic, but we are never told. Instead, through scene after scene, we are shown how he likes to carry a telephone directory around with him in which he draws intricate diagrams of machines and engines, and how he bonds with Emily's family through the dog and her mother's 'dump cake'.

The story is told by a removed narrator who seems to have no emotional insight into the story he is telling. For some reason I cannot fathom, even after reading this book twice, I can't shake the feeling that this adds to the book's emotional depth. The perspective is so emotionally removed that the big scenes deliver a huge punch, more so than most first-person narratives, and if you're anything like me, you'll be dying to read it again soon after you've finished it the first time.


Sloan invites the reader to judge characters by their actions, not their thoughts, and there is something incredibly admirable about that. By viewing Emily and Sam's world from the clouds, Sloan is able to trace fate's path through their lives, examining each and every person who makes an impact on their stories.

I'll Be There seems to me an extremely important and interesting addition to the world of contemporary realistic YA, and I've spent the last few days heartily recommending it to EVERYONE.

So, you know, go read it. Go love it, go pass it on. You won't be able to resist. Promise.