I like Sarah Hall’s writing, even though it can sometimes feel a little oppressive, a little too mannered. Her Booker contender of a few years ago, The Electric Michelangelo, was one of the best books on the list that year. The Carhullan Army is a departure in many ways, although it is still set in the author’s native Cumbria. It’s a departure because it has an overtly political tone, anti-American and feminist. This is laid on way too thick for my taste.
Sister, as she insists on being called now that her old name ‘unimportant’, narrates the novel in the form of a ’statement under Section 4(b) of the Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act’, presumably in a Britain that has given way to totalitarianism. If nothing else, this mistakes the mealy-mouthed language that dictatorships use. For example, the Nazi’s ‘unrestricted power’ was achieved under the umbrella of the ‘enabling act’, which in their nauseating language the fascists called ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation’. When they give themselves unrestricted powers, the last thing dictatorships do is to actually say so. In fact this ever so slight mistake is symptomatic of the entire book: it appears to be the work of a naïve mind, and the author cannot hide behind the narrator to excuse this and there is next to no dramatic tension.
If this had been a comedy, and there is precious little of that to be found here, or had the slightest trace of irony in tone I might feel differently. But Hall is deadly serious. Her plot is bleak and unremitting. All of her characters are damaged in one way or another, and not a few of them are psychotic. Because we know that the novel is, in effect, being narrated from a prison cell we are only left to find out how Sister ends up there.
The feminist agenda is front and centre. All women are required to have contraceptive devices fitted, and the entire resistance to the sinister ‘Authority’ appears to be run out of a farmhouse populated by militant lesbians. Now don’t get me wrong, militant lesbians would very probably have something to say about a dictatorship in Britain, but is it really acceptable to suggest that no one else would?
I was very disappointed with this novel. It’s one dimensional, preachy and lacking in imagination. Hall’s writing is almost enough to make one ignore these flaws, but not quite. I hope that she turns her back on this sort of agitprop fiction.
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