In the first scenes of this skillful and effecting dystopian novel, the mother of a young boy, Jackson, and his toddler brother, Frank, disappears from the hotel the family is staying at, and the last we see of the boys' father he is following a policeman out the door. Not waiting around to see what happens next, Jackson puts his brother halfway into a suitcase and drags him out into the night. . . .
We soon learn that this England is a somewhat ratcheted up future England, in which society is a good way toward disintegrating and the government has fairly totalitarian control of the populace. Cities have constricted, leaving dilapidated, crumbling housing complexes standing abandoned. People still have jobs to go to, though, and their cell phones and laptops still work. The story of Arkady is the story of the brothers' life and growth on the edges of this fraying and chaotic world. Langley's prose is often purposefully ragged, but his physical descriptions of the physical world, both the beauty of the natural and the fractured man-made, help bring the novel much of its gravity. So, too, the perspective of the two brothers, which Langley moves between effectively as best fits each part of their stories. Their resilience is that of a single unit, sometimes on their own and sometimes mixing in fitfully with communities they find along their way. The telling is somewhat hallucinatory, but the world is just close enough to our own to be clearly imaginable.… (meer)
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We soon learn that this England is a somewhat ratcheted up future England, in which society is a good way toward disintegrating and the government has fairly totalitarian control of the populace. Cities have constricted, leaving dilapidated, crumbling housing complexes standing abandoned. People still have jobs to go to, though, and their cell phones and laptops still work. The story of Arkady is the story of the brothers' life and growth on the edges of this fraying and chaotic world. Langley's prose is often purposefully ragged, but his physical descriptions of the physical world, both the beauty of the natural and the fractured man-made, help bring the novel much of its gravity. So, too, the perspective of the two brothers, which Langley moves between effectively as best fits each part of their stories. Their resilience is that of a single unit, sometimes on their own and sometimes mixing in fitfully with communities they find along their way. The telling is somewhat hallucinatory, but the world is just close enough to our own to be clearly imaginable.… (meer)