Review by britflik (2009-08-12)
As an avid reader of Orwell and Huxelyesque dystopian novels, my friend immediately recommended me this book when he became aware of it.

He described it as one of the most depressing books he had ever read. I would go one further and state, so far , it is my least favourite book to read after smoking a joint. It really comes at you and brings you down.

The first few pages resemble some sort of psychological sci-fi as you are completely unsure of what Auster is describing as he uses metaphors and similies with reckless abandon and morbid regularity to illustrate the incomprehensibility of the predicament of the inhabitants of the city.

A city in which no economy functions, the government only interacts with the people using vans to pick up corpses to convert into useful hydrocarbons 'the government only care about us when we are dead' is an oft said line. The cities inhabitants seem to behave as if they are in one massive concentration camp and the descriptions of their struggles for survival seem to come more from the pages of Levi or Solzenhitsyn than Orwell or Wyndham.

There are many old reused images from dystopian literaturemy favourite being the building of the giant sea-wall, a fruitless activity in which the population is forced to engage so as to distract them from their own worries and rebellious thoughts (inevitably it soon stops and is forgotten).

Yet the very fact that the government has stopped caring is very singular for dystopian fiction, the government in most novels of this type are constantly haranguing and sheperding the populace towards their own gains or losses irregardless of the pain, suffering or lack of knowledge their population has of the event or circumstances. Here the government does the unthinkable, it abandons the people to their fate.

This sense of abandonment and hollowness underlines the sense of despair I feel when I read this book. There is literally no hope, class is no object although a couple of times there are attempts to ressurect it, charity fails as humanity prevails and intellectualism literally goes up in a puff of smoke. The government stands by doing nothing and so with no basis for this society to survive on it is utterly doomed to failure.

This book is by far one of my favourite, not only for the gripping read (as there is a main protagonist, but her story matters fairly little compared to the events of the city), but also for the way so many of the old precepts of dystopian literature are amalgamated in this novel. Some are turned on their head, others perfected, leaving the experience overall satisfying and deeply moving.