Alex Foster\u2019s sparky debut novel is built around a new technology of travel. Pods launch high into the sky and connect with one of thousands of \u201ccircuit vessels\u201d, all orbiting the world from east to west. Travellers then descend in another pod, arriving wherever they choose. Spring-loaded pads store the pod\u2019s kinetic energy when they land, and propel them up again when they launch. It\u2019s so cheap, so rapid and so ubiquitous that everyone uses it. You can work in London, meet a friend for lunch in New York and come back to work that afternoon.<\/p>\n
The novel\u2019s narrator, Tanner Kelly, has grown up in rural Alaska, a backwater without a pod station. He is\u00a0only too glad to escape, getting a glamorous job in London as personal assistant to scientist Victor Bickle, who works for CWC, the company that runs the network. Bickle\u2019s job is selling CWC\u2019s services and whitewashing their effects. As the company\u2019s booming chief of communications, Cromwell Grant, tells Tanner: \u201cevery CWC customer demands two things. He demands the products and services we provide. And he demands a clean conscience with which to consume them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The clean conscience is an issue because the pod technology is harming the world, accelerating the Earth\u2019s rotation. CWC deny that \u201cday contraction\u201d has anything to do with pod transportation, but this is a lie. This effect is small-scale at first, days becoming a few minutes shorter, but across the course of the novel we go from days of 23 hours and 45 minutes to days of 22 hours, of 20 hours, of 12 hours, the Earth spinning more and more rapidly. Foster likens it to ants on a floating log. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, 1,000 ants all running on top of the log in the same direction will spin the log beneath them. Workdays contract, circadian rhythms are shattered, people take stimulants to stay awake and then sedatives to get any sleep.<\/p>\n
The prose is vivid and equally able to describe the large-scale disasters and the minutiae of ordinary living<\/p>\n
It is a metaphor for climate change, of course, and a good one: the novel dramatises people\u2019s incapacity, or more precisely their unwillingness, to address the problems they are causing the world. Pod travel is so convenient, and it is so important to the economy, to transport and trade, that people will not give it up. Days pass in six hours, rotation becoming so\u00a0fast that the centrifugal effect counteracts gravity, with the oceans and atmosphere bulging at the equator and the ground in the northern and southern hemispheres starting to slope, turning the world into a surreal funhouse environment.<\/p>\n
Rather than ban pods, \u201cthe shell\u201d is created, a world-encircling ceiling built on gigantic pillars to keep the air inside and to recycle water through pipes to where it is needed. This isn\u2019t very plausible, and requires humanity missing more obvious solutions (since the day contraction is caused by the pods and circuit vessels travelling east to west, couldn\u2019t we just reverse their direction of travel and slow the rotation down?). But by this point in the novel realism has been superseded by satire. Rather than dialling down pod transport, the network is hugely expanded. The inside of the shell has adverts projected upon it. A protester explodes a bomb at a CWC event, shouting, ironically, \u201crevolution!\u201d Days pass in three hours, then two, and the momentum of the story hurtles to its unavoidable catastrophic finale.<\/p>\n
It is a sharp conceit, and would make for a memorable short story. Foster expands it to novel length by developing his main characters, and dwelling on their relationships. Tanner, working for CWC, is complicit in the global disaster, but he is not consumed by guilt: on the contrary, he loves his job, is glad to have escaped his backwater religious-fundamentalist home, excited by big-city living, falling in love with his dishy co-worker Miguel. As the days shorten and work becomes increasingly exhausting, things sour with Miguel and the story gives us a great deal of to and fro of their breakup: too much, really.<\/p>\n
A second main character, teenage Winnie Pines, whose father has disappeared and whose mother is in a coma, self-harms by giving herself electric shocks. As the world accelerates, she overcomes her shyness and low self-esteem, gets a\u00a0job, and her storyline converges with Tanner\u2019s. A\u00a0nuanced and interesting character, Winnie is the work of a writer with real talent. The prose is lively, too: vivid, full of lovely touches, and equally able to describe the large-scale disasters, thunderstorms, earthquakes, end-of-days big-screen doom, and the minutiae of ordinary living.<\/p>\n
The book isn\u2019t flawless. The realness of Winnie throws into relief the two-dimensionality of many of the other characters, and the warping of time makes it hard to be sure what the pacing is. But this is an impressive debut about people struggling on with their lives in a world literally spinning out of control.<\/p>\n
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