The Carhullan Army -- Sarah Hall

Post-apocalyptic narratives have always exerted an ineluctable pull on me. From happening upon Jean Ure's harrowing Plague 99 trilogy (now, scandalously, out of print) as a child, through a period of downright obsession with the dodgy New Zealand television series The Tribe in my mid-teens, to more grown-up explorations of the genre in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood, I have been captivated by depictions of societies shattered, of the old world order wiped out in one fell swoop, and of what happens to those left struggling to survive.

The Carhullan Army (Faber, 2007) opens with a nameless woman preparing to make her escape from a Cumbrian town which is under the auspices of an oppressive regime. The woman, who we know only as 'Sister', abandons a husband she no longer loves, and sets off in search of Carhullan, a farm-commune consisting solely of women, where she hopes to find sanctuary. She is met, however, by a gun barrel and a punch that fractures her shoulder, and is promptly incarcerated in a tiny metal tank for three days while the women of Carhullan wait for her to crack.

So far, so different from the happy-clappy agrarian utopias of the kind that feature in Year of the Flood or Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Carhullan's women are taut and unsentimental, prepared to do whatever it takes to protect their lifestyle. Their leader is Jackie, whose language is blunt and crass, but whose actions shimmer with intellect and idealism. 'Sister' passes the initiation test, and is subsumed into the world of the commune.

And that is pretty much that for the next hundred pages. We learn a lot more about the day-to-day functionality of the commune, which has been intricately and admirably imagined by Hall. Her descriptions of the commune's fare are wonderful - bowls of porridge with butter forming 'an oily yellow pool in a crater in the centre', and the 'puckered strip' of raw deer tongue that Sister is pressured into eating. I have a soft spot for writers who can render mundanities beautiful in this way. We learn about the work that keeps the commune ticking over, the peat-cutting with which Sister assists, and also about the handful of undernourished men who live in a kind of satellite commune.

However, engaged though I was by this depiction of a "cosy catastrophe" lifestyle, I was unable to discern any real driving plot until page 151, when Jackie, the leader, starts to assert her own agenda and forces the women to either support her plans for revolution or leave Carhullan. Sister commits herself to Jackie's brutal training, which we experience in wincing detail . . . but all the while as I was reading, I was conscious of the pages-to-go thinning between my right thumb and the back cover, and all I could think was: how on earth is Hall going to squash the actual rebellion into the space she has left?

The answer, of course, is that she doesn't. We cut from the training up at Carhullan directly into the dying moments of the last battle scene, and within two bloody, bullet-riddled pages the novel is extinguished. It's unexpected, and my gut reaction was to deem it a bit of a cop-out on the author's part - all that slow tip-toeing build-up, and then - wooosh! - one giant leap over most of the action. Upon reflection, though, I'm inclined to think that this omission was a conscious decision to place all the emphasis on the women's path to war: the act of battle itself was not as important as the philosophy behind it. And indeed, preservation of this philosophy is the reason why Jackie commands Sister to surrender at the end - to 'make them understand what we did and who we were'.

Ultimately, Hall's exploration of feminism in a post-apocalyptic environment makes for a fascinating and worthwhile read. Do the women truly succeed in empowering themselves, or do they - with their army fatigues, their cropped hair, their guns and their bombs -  merely ape a patriarchal template of power? I'm not entirely sure. All I know is, the scene I found the most powerful was the one where Jackie asks Sister why she allowed the regime to fit her with a contraceptive coil that she emphatically did not want. Sister tries to explain that she didn't feel she had a choice in the matter, and Jackie says: "Suppose you had that old gun I've fixed up. Suppose you had it in your hand and the doctor asked you to lie back and open your legs wide. Suppose if you said no, he was going to make you. Would it make any difference, that gun?"  "Yes," Sister says. "It would." 

As someone who has never thought about guns much before, the realisation that in such a situation, such a weapon would make a difference to me, too, really chilled my blood. Food for thought.

The Seeds of Time -- John Wyndham

Being a sucker for all things dystopian and apocalpytic, and having vastly enjoyed The Day of the Triffids earlier this year, I couldn't resist this 1956 collection of science-fiction short stories by John Wyndham when I spotted it on my boyfriend's parents' bookshelf last weekend.

Time-travel, if done well, is one of my favourite fictional devices, and it forms the basis of the first story in Wyndham's collection: Chronoclasm. How satisfying a word is that? I bloody love it. I haven't yet determined whether it's Wyndham's own neologism, but it comes from the Ancient Greek khronos (time) and klastes (a person who breaks something). A chronoclasm is, according to the story's scatty and romantic heroine, Tavia, 'when a thing goes and happens at the wrong time because somebody was careless' - i.e., when a time traveller somehow fractures the course history should have taken. (Doctor Who, I think, is a bit of a classic chronoclast...)

Wyndham called this story a romantic comedy, and indeed it is light-hearted, shading towards silly in places. Tavia Lattery, a student from the Twenty-Second Century, receives a love-letter on her birthday, penned by her long-dead great-great-great-uncle, Gerald Lattery. Driven by curiosity, she sneaks into her university laboratory's 'history-machine', and searches Gerald out in the early Twentieth Century, much to the consternation of her fellow academics. I loved the examples of chronoclasms given in the story: of Hero demonstrating a steam-turbine at Alexandria, and Archimedes using napalm at the siege of Syrcuse. I did find myself wishing that Gerald and Tavia were a little less saccharine, but enjoyed the denoument of their romance nonetheless.

Martians cropped up in a couple of stories in the collection: Dumb Martian was my favourite of these, pitting a callous Earthman, Duncan, against a Martian woman, Lellie, whom he has purchased from her parents for the purpose of keeping him company during a five-year contract on a sub-moon of Jupiter. An allegory for racism and domestic abuse, the story explores Duncan's determination to ignore his wife's intellectual capacity, his escalating cruelty, and the revenge Lellie finally wreaks. I loved this story for its cold, silent battle of wits in its closing scenes - the breathless intensity of their hatred for one another, played out against a backdrop of the whole dark universe.

Parallel universes are another of my favourite sci-fi tropes, and in Wyndham's Opposite Number, academic Peter Ruddle is visited by an alternate version of himself and his ex-girlfriend Jean, who are most appalled to discover that they are not married in Peter's reality. It's a clever little riff about paths not taken; thought-provoking, and ultimately, I found, rather comforting.

Other stories include Pawley's Peepholes, a satirical take on time-travel as a kind of bawdy seaside attraction, and the fabulously grim Survival, in which a meek young woman politely dispatches the entire crew of a marooned spaceship. There were a couple of clangers in the collection, too - I wasn't a mad fan of Compassion Circuit, where an ailing woman is turned into a robot to preserve her mind, nor of the somewhat insipid closing story, Wild Flower, where a schoolmistress disturbed by the encroach of technology finds solace in a bunch of unusual flowers. I think the problem with both of these stories for me was that they felt underdeveloped; I didn't believe in the characters, and I didn't feel as though Wyndham believed in them either.

That said, I think that overall, this is a brilliant collection. Wyndham explains in his introduction that he wrote the stories over fifteen years as a kind of experiment, moulding the sci-fi motif to a variety of short story genres. The result is something that you don't find often with single-author collections: a clutch of stories which are consistent in voice and theme, but which are so assorted in their tone, in their handling and in their purpose, that they fly from the page in all different directions: never predictable, never tedious.

The whole experience has sent me off on a bit of a sci-fi jag: I've just received a rather stout package through the post containing H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, none of which I've read before, and all of which I've heard glittering and marvellous things about. Watch this space.