Shortlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize "Thrilling...A topical and deftly satirical novel." --Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

Most of NUBClub were not impressed by Lanchester's parable about global warning, refugees, and alienation. The small number of supporters of the book argued that Lanchester was painting a picture of what a unreflective generation growing up in a world of catastrophic climate change might be, and the horror of how little they understand or care about the incidents of xenophobia, slavery, and cruelty was a commentary on what our own checked-out generation is doing right now. But most of us didn't accept that. Complaints revolved around the lack of detail in the book. Just about nothing is described at all -- the wall is the same grey concrete object, the ocean is featureless, and even when we end up in the woods or on a raft, Lanchester gives us only a minimal glimpse of what we're looking at. Characters fare no better -- the most content we get about a human being in the book is that they like to whittle, or they hate their parents, or in some cases, only that they are a teenage girl or a redhead. In a pure parable, this could work, but Lanchester chose to write this book in a first-person perspective, which means when the protagonist is not described and has effectively no interiority, you are basically just left with rereading the same vapid platitudes over and over again. Supporters argued that this vapidity was the point of the book, but the majority of us just felt it was way too much to ask to have us read about people with no motivations or characteristics in a world with no details for an entire novel. There was no way to care about a romantic plot when the two lovers have no features, or a tragic turn when we don't really know the victims at all. The consensus was that if The Wall were much shorter, it could have worked as an allegory, but as a first-person full novel, Lancaster needed to do a lot more than write a couple of language poetry bits about wind and water and concrete to make us feel something. Essentially, the book is a missed opportunity, an interesting theme wasted by an underdone treatment.