This is a humdinger and no mistake. 1984 for the #metoo generation. Many dystopian novels focus on a stylised and imagined society, frequently futuristic. Widowland takes a situation, that those of us of a certain generation must surely have considered, and that is – where might we be if we had submitted to Germany rather than proceeded to World War II ?
Widowland speaks of limits to literature and the construction of a hierarchy for females, doctrines of a regime called The Alliance, a paradox if ever there was one. It’s like Orwell meets Margaret Atwood with Mary Wollstonecraft making it a threesome.
It’s a chilling tale with an air of unease and tension that builds slowly with an almost suffocating crescendo towards the end, heart in mouth stuff. It’s set in a world that’s drab and grey although there is the sense that beyond this island’s shores something brighter beckons.
Rose is a cleverly constructed character who seems to show the reader all of the pitfalls and risks of life in a rigid regime. She is interesting too because she does not present as overly rebellious or defiantly opposed to the regime she’s living under, in fact at times she seems colourless but she needs to for as the story progresses she arrives almost organically at some obvious realisations. There was a sense at times that she didn’t automatically comprehend exactly how she thought and felt. It was as if acceptance was implicit. Somebody brainwashed and on a treadmill of life. What happens if you dare to step off that treadmill?
It’s a compelling narrative, desire to find out what happens runs alongside a disbelief and incredulity for what might have been. And although it’s a fiction there’s almost a sense of panic being created, well for this reader certainly, because....... you just never know!
It’s a crisp narrative with attention to detail, salient detail, some astute characterisations and a pace that drives the reader on. One of those books you don’t really want to put down for a second until you reach the end.
Names that fill your heart with chill appear to be flourishing, albeit ageing, when you thought they were all “dealt with“. I still get a shiver of intense consternation if I imagine the Gestapo and the SS conducting their business in good old London town. But there are other names that fill your heart with joy, namely some very strong female novelists like Jane Austin and Emily Brontë. Although what Rose has to do to the text of their seminal novels doesn’t bear thinking about.
This is an intelligent treatment of an alternate history which works on a number of levels and and I felt it was very much aimed at today’s woman. But I also wondered how generations, postwar generations, respond to a narrative such as this? I’ve come to it as an older reader whose father fought in the war and whose mother’s family were bombed out of London during the Blitz. The threats depicted here, from The Alliance, are very palpable given all than I’d heard from my parents and their friends about the behaviour of the Nazis.
But more broadly a novel like this warns us of the dangers of a hierarchical and totalitarian regime. And we need to be very afraid. I wonder what Rose might have made of this book if she were required to work on it? And I wonder how she would have “reorganised“ the text to satisfy The Alliance?
My thanks to Milly Reid of Quercus Books for a gifted copy of this novel and opportunity to participate in the social media blast.
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