The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica

...technology, since the Middle Eastern Wars of the late eighties cut the oil supply to a trickle, has gone backward rather than forward...

...He has not troubled to imagine nuclear holocaust...

...It is a gripping adventure story, and very cannily told, though we are not bedeviled with flashbacks or the currently fashionable Chinese-box construction...

...Both call upon us for a kind of caring the story hasn't earned...

...Some read trash...

...This is high moral ground, and not unfamiliar...

...I think The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica may be next...

...The characters remain unrealized, often merely names...

...Every few years a really good story comes along that we can read in the old voracious way - Mary Renault's early novels, Golding (remember Lord of the Flies...

...This novel of adventure is also a novel of ideas and truths...

...Grim's own heart-wisdom is similarly explicit, a salutary and continual affirmation of the e-ternal verities: that "the most terrible of lives is a gift for which we should be grateful," that "it is not possible...

...The old methods still work splendidly, however: uncertainties, discoveries, information withheld, hinted, foreshadowed, even on occasion prophesied...

...The hero, Grim Fiddle (Batchelor's names tend to the pointlessly inventive), reaches South Georgia in (yes) the Falklands, gets a son, becomes a leader - enough of summary...

...There are pogroms and disease, "millions starving as winter approached, crucifixions commonplace...

...Batchelor's half-American narrator - and hero - was born in Sweden in 1973 in the backwash of Vietnam, raised in the marginal subculture of American draft-resisters who never went home, an outsider from the start...

...Those who are young enough not to have read much will experience it as profound - indeed, why condescend...

...Events occur chronologically...

...I earnestly adjure you not to read the jacket copy, which commits the unforgivable sin of answering a question the narrative itself has no intention of answering until page 351...

...If the novelists called "serious" don't give them to us, we still find ways to support a habit too ingrained to kick...

...There is a single narrator whom we have no reason to distrust...

...Enough to say that Grim Fiddle is, as he tells us, not a David, not a Moses, certainly not a Christ as some think, not even quite a Beowulf, though Scripture and saga pervade his tale...

...He must enact the familiar lesson, that power corrupts, becoming a more terrible kind of outlaw than he is already: ' 'an outlaw from my own heart...

...There's lots of room for political philosophy, though - including a whole chapter on utilitarianism...

...If you step out of bounds just once," one of his mentors tells him, "you can't get back in...

...Those who can, flee and join the Fleet of the Damned...

...Its interior dimensions are ambitious, but these, unlike its absorbing story, offer no revelations...

...Though Grim ceaselessly and explicitly questions his nature and that of the novel's huge cast of characters, such discursiveness does not serve to establish the conviction that Russell Hoban achieves in Riddley Walker at once by the touching discord between the debased language and the subtle consciousness of Riddley, his post-holocaust hero...

...by 2009 it is largely over...

...The Tolkien generation is gone with adolescence, and the current one seems to be asking a less simple-minded opposition of black hats versus white...

...For all ages it's a very good read, and something more.mething more...

...It is a serious theme, but what keeps us reading through this chronicle of the unthinkable are the immemorial pleasures of adventure stories - weather, geography, suspense...

...Batchelor's tale is morally far more complex than Tolkien's saga, a tale of sin, pride, the hardening of hearts, of good and evil mixed...

...We are allowed to posit some sort of compromised recovery - at the expense of whole populations who take to the seas, to die by storm or plague or starvation or pirates as desperate as themselves, or to attain the icy horrors of Antarctic concentration camps maintained through the International Ice Cross to salve the collective bad conscience of mankind...

...Man has no need of science to render life brutish, short, and merciless...

...Look round us, Batchelor seems to say: consider the boat people, consider those who must live and breed and sicken and die in refugee and prison camps...

...Some read history thrillers...

...Grim's packed narrative leaves little time for human relationships, and though this failure of love is part of the substance of Grim's confession, it restricts the novelist's achievement even more than the narrator's...

...Some read detective stories...

...Imagine, then, the advanced societies reduced to a subsistence economy, with the predictable result when too many compete for too little...

...Once the story gets going there's a surprise on almost every page...

...The story is set in the imminent future, the years our children will inherit...

...and Tolkien, more recently Water ship Down and Riddley Walker...

...For them, it will be profound...

...The fault is in ourselves, not our tools...

...There is the future...

...The novel's concern is not with the center but the margins, those outside who can't get back in...

...Reading generations are short, however, and moral ground should be plowed yearly...

...consider all those who today exist outside the bounds of our privileged attention...

...Batchelor's narrator does not tell us - does not really know - what may be going on in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia in the years after he escapes with his family from burning Stockholm...

...Batchelor's vision of the future is of an Age of Exile in which the human condition has become the subhuman condition of the refugee...

...to rule innocently," that "truth can be smeared, can be interred, yet perhaps it cannot be erased," that "what men have done wrong, men can do right...