Kings of a Dead World

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On the speculative side of the plot, it felt very much like The Handmaids Tale. It is very easy to see this world event scenario happening. It makes you question the ethical dilemmas, of who should live and die, like the final solution, although this isn’t discussed in any depth. Other ethical questions about how we should live, who has the power to make these decisions, should they make these ethical decisions. It was all very immersive and felt very realistic, insightful and powerful. Towards the end, there were some really good plot revelations and I felt the ending was handled perfectly. My only real issue with the book is that it is a bit of a sausage fest, there aren't any strong female characters or indeed any characters that aren't in the book except to be a plaything for the male characters. Even Rose - Ben's wife is mainly there as a hinderance. Perhaps that will change in upcoming books but for now I am only looking at this one. The Earth’s limited resources are dwindling. The solution is The Sleep: periods of hibernation imposed on those who remain with only a Janitor to watch over the sleepers. As I said I am not usually a dystopian reader so I cannot compare this book to many others but I thought that the world building was great but I would have liked a little more explanation of how the world got that way (but have a feeling there may be other books so maybe it gets explained then) but what we do get is a short leap from understandable.

There are some more discrepancies, like how is bank robbery a thing in the near future? Or how would water ever possibly submerse the Shard? But what about a Sleep with no dreams? “I wanted there to be a difference between forced Sleep and actual sleep,” Mollart says. “It shouldn’t be a thing where you get to restore your body and your mind. It’s like they’re turned off, literally turned off.” Mollart’s intriguing and timely premise is executed with verve – Kings of a Dead World is filmic in its scope’ - Alison Moore, Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Kings of a Dead World is definitely an incredible read. Jamie Mollart presents us with a future that is not beyond the realms of possibility. I don't know that it had anything particularly new to say, though. The picture it painted of a climate-apocalypse Britain felt detailed and interesting, and much like The Wall, it had a real sense of the landscape. The underlying messages about power and consequences I liked a lot, and again felt really real. But really new ideas? Not a ton, honestly. I feel like Early Riser did a much better job of thinking about the effects that hibernation would have on society, for example. On the flip side, I certainly enjoyed the pastiche of trading and ideas about what effect traders actually have on the world.Despite that I did really enjoy the book and would probably read the sequel if there is one to find out what happens next in this world and where it all goes from there. It is hard to talk about the book without giving spoilers so I will just say, definitely give this book a go and see what you think and then come talk to me about it! I think the only place the pacing came as a detriment was in some of the emotional exchanges between characters. I wanted to feel a little more for their interactions, some of which were imbued with such human feeling that I didn’t really have time to take it all in. That said, I can see why it would be that way – the chain of events wasn’t going to wait for emotion or relationships. It certainly didn’t detract from the thoroughly engaging reading experience.

Although the Sleep is initially presented as a solution for the sake of the common good, it becomes clear that it is more of a life sentence than a sacrifice. “It’s the actual stealing of time,” Mollart says, “time is stolen from them, rather than time you can do something else in. If they were having beautiful dreams while they’re Asleep, it would just take away a little bit of the fear of it. … There should be nothing. Not to get into the comparison with death and all that, but it’s little incremental bits of death.” I’ve been a long running guest on Litopia, the web’s biggest writing podcast, interviewed by BBC Ulster, BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio Nottingham, featured at The Isle of Man Book Festival, Lowdham Festival, Writing East Midlands’ Writing Conference and have taught novel writing for Writing School Leicester. In the sleeping city, elderly Ben struggles with his limited waking time and the disease that is stealing his wife from him. Outside, lonely Janitor Peruzzi craves the family he never knew. Around them both, dissatisfaction is growing. The city is about to wake. By contrast, I would liked to have seen a little more in the Before section, of the events that led up to the introduction of the Sleepers. This section is well-realised and the sequence of events of the ‘end of the world as we know it’ feels all too credible and realistic. But there feels as if there was scope here for more character work in the relationships between the younger versions of Ben and Rose and both their relationships with charismatic cult leader Andreas. There’s also an interesting relationship with the disturbingly violent police officer Quinn, who pursues them and who later plays a pivotal role in the story. Putting the conflict between these two more directly into the story could, I think, have been interesting. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed the book. It was insightful, intense and imaginative. Kings of a Dead World is a thought-provoking thriller of a novel that will entertain to the very end.Less effective are the Asleep sections which focus on Peruzzi, the city’s Janitor. You can see why they’re there — to give us an insight into the wider organisation of the city than we could get merely from Ben’s POV. But they are less involving perhaps because Peruzzi and his fellow Janitors are isolated, solitary figures, hard to empathise with, even before we start to see their truly amoral, even murderous, sides emerge. And their Paganistic worship of Bacchus gives these sections an almost 70s Logan’s Run-esque vibe.

Three narratives and two timelines - Jamie Mollart has done an exceptional job of fusing these together to create an awesome reading experience. And this is also certainly true of Jamie Mollart’s Kings of a Dead World. It’s core concept — that dwindling resources and overpopulation leave the human race seeking drastic, and bleak, measures to ensure survival is an impactful premise because you know that it’s a real one and that whatever real answers we come up with aren’t going to be pretty, if we even come up with any at all. Being the sleeper is easy, or so we think: Sleep Donation posits that donating sleep is as painless and noble as giving blood. That’s the party line for the Sleep Corps’ champ recruiter Trish Edgewater, who convinces the parents of newborn donor Baby A that she has a surfeit of the stuff, and to not give would be to doom the nation’s insomniacs to an agonizing, brutal, unnecessary death. For Baby A, or Washington Irving’s archetypal snoozer Rip Van Winkle, or the Narrator, they get to wake up into a changed world. It’s the people watching them sleep, moving through the insomniac hours, who have to do the actual hard work of breaking and reshaping the world.Kings of a Dead World is also quite thought-provoking. There is a passage in the book where Ben says, "The meeting of the United World Congress was to be held the following month. The leaders were to be flown in over a period of three days, and decisions were to be made that would end the shortages and over-population and the rising waters and wars and starvation. The solutions presented ranged from extreme to unimaginable, and there was a feeling, certainly amongst the people that I associated with, that this was the final solution, no one, ever expects they will see Armageddon in their lifetime. no-one expected the world wars, the middle-east wars, the Korean holocaust, the oil wars, and yet, somehow there was always an end to them, and the human race marched on." It is a frighteningly entertaining look at how good we are as a race at isolating and destroying ourselves.’ SFF World Peruzzi is one of the kings of this dead world. Raised from birth to be a janitor, he leads a privileged if lonely life, monitoring his patch of the city, maintaining his sleepers and trading to earn the creds they will use to buy supplies when they wake.

Author Jamie Mollart laughs while admitting this, but the idea for Kings of a Dead World, his new dystopian novel about a world put to sleep to conserve resources, came to him in a dream. And why shouldn’t it have? “Sleep on it” is the common advice for a human being pondering a big choice or change, with the promise that a good night’s sleep will allow them better perspective to write a novel, make a life-shifting decision… maybe even save the world? The dead world is a futuristic version of earth, where climate change has left much of Britain flooded and what remains is parched and arid. No amount of solar panels or wind turbines has been enough to satiate the world's greed for power. Therefore the United World Congress has come up with an extreme solution - if the demand for resources cannot be curbed, then the time that people can use those resources will be. The result is The Sleep - three months of induced sleep followed by a month of real life. I think this may be a controversial book for some, then so were most of Ballards, he didn't do too bad as an author, did he? The book alternates between three threads, one featuring a sleeping man who takes care for an elderly woman, one janitor whose immersion in drugs induced parties and AI supported commodity trading is upended by excursions into the city he monitors, and a storyline involving climate activists turned full on terrorists amidst the climate change induced demise of society. All these threads come together in a rather Marvel movie kind of obvious manner, with family being the linking pin. The conclusion off the man and his wife reminded me strongly of Amour (in general this feels like a masculine dominated book, with the women fitting neatly in wife/lover stereotypes and not really having much agency in any of the timelines).

In the Narrator’s case, Mollart says, “[he] can’t break out of the cycle that he’s in without inventing someone to tell him how to do it, which is just such a modern male thing. We’re rubbish about talking about our feelings; we’re rubbish about facing responsibility for ourselves.” Toxic masculinity is a recurring theme in Mollart’s work, from his prior novel The Zoo to his next project: “We’re the shit half of the species, and I just think male friendships are really interesting. Most blokes have one real strong relationship, often from your childhood, and you become really mirrors of each other. That’s kind of what the Tyler Durden/Narrator [dynamic] is like. Blokes egg each other on, [and] it’s difficult for men to show affection to other men, it’s just sad. As long as that continues, we won’t break the cycle of nonsense of male violence and the patriarchy that we’ve got unfortunately still.” If you enjoy reading about dark futures and enjoy films like Bladerunner and Dark City, where one person may make a difference, but that difference will only be for them, then this is a well written and compelling tale of the horrors that humanity (such a word is misplaced for most of the people in this book) puts upon itself, just by being nothing more than what it has to be.’ British Science Fiction Association The Tyler/Narrator dynamic plays out in the relationship between fellow Janitors Peruzzi and Slattery: colleagues, quasi-friends, and partners in crime. While their decadent lifestyles spoil them with at-home gyms and Brave New World-inspired raves every three months, Slattery tempts Peruzzi into seeking out greater highs than pills and sex. Their explorations into the Sleeping world at first tap into a Fight Club-esque awakening of the blood, only to tip into Project Mayhem levels of voyeurism and violation in pursuit of confirmation that what they do actually matters. Maybe that is the best compliment I personally can pay the Kings of the Dead, if it had been written by J G Ballard, I would not have been the least bit surprised. In its detached and bleakness of narration, the book reminds me of Samantha Schweblin her writing. The anti globalist academics gone rogue turn-out rather unreflective while traversing a rural abandoned landscape, with gas stations selling diesel for ten pounds per liter (that will just take a few years and some more of inflation, crossed my mind sardonically).