Yes, That Change: Around the Corner

An island nation ravaged by The Change has fortified itself with a wall, with young Defenders conscripted to patrol 10,000km of concrete walkways to keep Others out. Sounds familiar, no?

Cleverly plotted, The Wall is a quick read that projects a grim future—no travel between countries allowed, no beaches left anywhere in the world. Threw up all kinds of questions for me about our real world, right here, right now. It felt—well, a little too real for comfort.

The text is clean and spare with occasional splashes of concrete poetry, like ocean spray, unstoppable.

A “blond baby” politician and the narrator Kavanagh’s parents offer the promise of depth, yet somehow by the end this is a promise that seems incompletely fulfilled. Maybe that’s because I’m kept so close to the moment all the time that there doesn’t seem to be any room for the backstory that teases me with its possibilities.

The Wall plants huge questions in the mind. The ending circles back to the beginning in a clever nod to its own fictional nature, in a way that really did make me want to go back and read it over again. Its biggest impact was the uneasy impression that this future is right around the corner.