Reviews of The Wall by John Lanchester

Media Reviews

New York Times In its closing lines, like the album of the same name, the novel doubles back on itself to take the shape of the Wall — but it lives most vividly in the places where its meticulous structure breaks down. Lanchester constructs a more elegant wall in prose than any politician could in concrete, but the limits that it imposes on itself are still barriers, no matter how artistically designed.

The Guardian It’s a clever, clairvoyant concept. Lanchester reveals with slow, steady control the cruelties of his strange new world and then socks you with their philosophical implications...Despite being very different to Lanchester’s last novel, Capital, The Wall suffers from some of the same flaws: underdeveloped characters, particularly the women, a lack of convincing detail and an overly schematic plot.

Washington Post As a parable, this is all highly relevant. As a novel, it’s fairly dull. Boredom is a hard state to portray effectively without succumbing to it...Lanchester knows how societies function and fail to function. He understands class conflicts on a profound level. All his previous insight about the way different groups of people live together and contend for resources could have illuminated this dystopia with real fire.

Kirkus Reviews Starred Review. Dystopian fiction done just right, with a scenario that's all too real.

Booklist Beautifully written and chillingly plausible, Lanchester's work is dystopian fiction at its finest.

Publishers Weekly This terrifyingly resonant depiction of desperation will spark lively discussions about the responsibilities climate change is restructuring, and is electrifying storytelling to boot.

 Adelle Waldman Like Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian love story Never Let Me Go, The Wall is intelligent, emotionally layered, and suspenseful, a pleasure to read in spite of the bleak future in which it is set. I only wish that this richly imagined future didn't feel quite as plausible as it does at the moment.

 Emily St. John Mandel In The Wall, John Lanchester takes our current political climate to its terrible and logical extreme. A harrowing, brilliant, and troublingly plausible vision of the future.

 Garth Risk Hallberg Book by book, John Lanchester proves himself one of our necessary writers, equal in wit, good nature, and fundamental sanity to whatever insane thing the new century throws at us. Like some lost work by George Orwell, The Wall reveals what's in front of all our noses.

 Joshua Ferris A dystopian distillation of our troubled times and an allegorical glimpse at a still-grimmer future, The Wall reminds us that even as politics corrupts and destroys, the soul erupts in surprising places to act as counterpoint and resistance. This patient, direct, suspenseful novel is one such eruption, and a civilizing comfort amid the simmering bloodlust.

 Keith Gessen A writer as funny as he is humane, John Lanchester has made a specialty of chronicling our contemporary descent into hell in the most charming possible way. This novel of life in the aftermath of climate change apocalypse is no exception. It is the scariest and most entertaining book I have read in a long time.

 Kim Stanley Robinson With The Wall, John Lanchester follows his mind-boggling financial essays and his great realist novel Capital with a bold science fiction fable, a vivid, swift, chilling, and ultimately beautiful human story.

 Philip Pullman John Lanchester's previous novels have all been memorable evocations of the world we're familiar with, but The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself.

Reader Reviews

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