From Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, to the global success of the Hunger Games film franchise, the early 21st century has been a golden – or should that be dark – age for dystopian visions of human destiny. Further confirmation that these days the future tends to loom rather than beckon came this week, when the latest Booker prize went to Paul Lynch’s bleakly urgent Prophet Song.
Lynch’s rendering of an imagined totalitarian Ireland taps into fears that a resurgent far right could threaten freedoms formerly taken for granted in the postwar west. As it follows the desperate journey of a family attempting to flee the new order, it also obliges readers to empathise with another developing crisis of our times: the terrible exposure to violence and abuse suffered by refugees on the move.
In an age shadowed by the climate emergency, the unknowable consequences of developments in artificial intelligence and growing geopolitical instability, it is inevitable and valuable that literature and popular culture should be reading the runes. But it would be nice to think that, at some point, dystopia’s sunnier other half – the cultural tradition that gave us Thomas More’s Utopia, News from Nowhere by William Morris and the early feminist visions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman – might make a comeback.
Utopian thinking has had a bad press for a long time, attacked from both the left and the right. In the late 19th century, Karl Marx considered utopian socialist attempts to map out the perfect society a dated distraction from the class struggle. In the mid-20th century, utopianism was often associated with the totalitarian excesses of fascism and communism. These days, the word itself – More’s pun on eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place) – has fallen into such disrepute that it is simply deployed to discredit ideas judged impractical to the point of irrelevance.
But excessive realism can be as culturally debilitating and unhelpful as idle dreaming. As Prof Ruth Levitas, one of Europe’s foremost scholars of utopian thought, has written: “Utopia helps us … by providing that double vision between present and future. We can imagine a future society with a different ethic, and look at our own practices from that standpoint.” News from Nowhere, in which Morris’s Victorian narrator, William Guest, visits a 21st-century Britain where acquisitive, competitive instincts have withered away, along with the state, employs this critical method. So, in our own time, does the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, which speculatively explores the social and economic transformations that could help humanity to cope with the consequences of the climate emergency.
The intimidating scale of contemporary crises, interrelated and ranging from the economic to the environmental, is today accompanied by a widespread conviction that prevailing orthodoxies are inadequate to the task of meeting them. A sense of the ominous defines the zeitgeist, running through the pages of books such as Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Lynch’s portrayal of political darkness enveloping one unfortunate family mines the same seam, giving eloquent expression to what he describes as a “tragic perspective”. But at a time when societies could desperately do with some imaginative headroom, it would be uplifting to see a new generation of authors following in the footsteps of Morris and Robinson as well.
