Moonbird Press, May 18, 2014.
Four Stars
The world in this novel is very similar to our own,
and the devastation it faces is something that we could easily see in the near future.
There has been a worldwide economic collapse due to the advent of peak oil
consumption, and as a result, all of our basic human systems – government,
trade, transportation – have shut down. Natalie and her husband Richard were
living in Vancouver at the time, but when things started to go downhill, they
invested in some farmland outside the city. Richard, then the mayor of
Vancouver, was against the move, but now, after “the peak”, the farm is the
only enclave of survival that they are currently aware of.
Natalie, Richard and their two teenage sons moved to
the farm shortly after gas stations closed down and transit stopped running. They
were joined by their immediate families and a few close friends. As time
passed, they took in more people, transients less fortunate than themselves.
Everyone contributes to the farm, but it has still reached capacity of
production, leading to the Farm Council’s decision not to allow any more “refugees”
to join the farm. The Council, begun to keep order on the farm, is now weighed
down by bureaucracy which is often manipulated to justify immoral actions.
Difficult choices are made because the farm is surrounded by death, and their
survival depends on a willingness to work together.
Communal living is difficult at the best of times,
and Natalie also must struggle with her troubled marriage. Richard is
manipulative and narcissistic – he controls the Farm Council and doesn’t believe
that he needs to do the manual labour that makes the farm run. He makes
impulsive decisions without consulting Natalie, and when she confronts him, he
makes it seem as though she is the abuser. Even if she wanted to, Natalie
cannot leave him because there is nowhere else to go – it’s reminiscent of the
past when divorce rates were low because women were not permitted to survive on
their own.
Natalie is pragmatic, able to sacrifice her former
expansive, acquisitive life for one of subsistence on the farm. Others are not
so willing to give up the power they had in the past – Richard especially
wishes to return to Vancouver and try to restart the government there. Natalie
will trade almost anything for the safety of her sons, but she still wishes for
reciprocal, caring love – and she may have found it, with Richard’s twin
brother Daniel. However, there is no possible life for them on the farm. When
they travel together to search for antibiotics to stave off a virulent strain
of the flu that has surrounded the farm, they realize there is a larger world
out there, with possibilities for change.
None of the characters are particularly likeable, but
they are all very real and flawed. I enjoyed the use of the farm enclosure as a
device for distilling human behaviour – with all kinds of people trapped and
forced to work together, some unsavoury beliefs and actions come quickly to the
surface. Feelings are expressed that would usually be hidden in the “civilized”
world, such as racism, sexism and classism. It is really a microcosm of current
world politics, especially the unwillingness to let in refugees – but with
their isolation policy, the farm members must confront the fact that they need
new blood to repopulate the world and carry on. This novel asks the question of
how humankind would move forward if we had to start over – and do we need to?
Should we? Or perhaps there is another way to live in this world.
I received this novel from Moonbird Press and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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