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Daughters of the North: A Novel
Daughters of the North: A Novel
Daughters of the North: A Novel
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Daughters of the North: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.

In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as “Sister” escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.

This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 13, 2009
ISBN9780061866593
Daughters of the North: A Novel
Author

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. She is the prizewinning author of six novels and three short story collections. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others, and the only person ever to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice. 

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Rating: 3.33408068161435 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Fairly good, disturbing dystopia. The ending felt rushed to me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very location specific in character and vocabulary. Dystopian england has flooded and one woman tries to escape the authority and follow a dream of joining a women's commune in Cumbria. It's sad and bad-ass at the same time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I vacillated between 3 and 4 stars for this book, because although I thought it was well-crafted and thought-provoking, after considering it, I didn't really like it.
    I couldn't identify with the protagonist, and I didn't agree with her views. For a while, I thought that the author was intentionally creating a very problematic situation, but (I could be wrong) I think she actually agrees with her protagonist's perspective. (The interview with her at the end of the book turned me toward that point of view.)
    However, regardless of the author's opinions, she's still created an interesting scenario.
    It's a near-future England. After severe socio-economic collapse, the government is struggling to manage its population. The first major issue with the book occurs here. Although the government is shown as being restrictive, cracking down on personal freedoms, we see nothing to indicate that it is actually abusive. Rather, it seems to be going out of its way to maintain order, provide people with food, etc. Our protagonist is traumatized and resentful about being required to wear an IUD (this seems to be her main reason to rebel‚ - but at the same time we see that people are living in crowded conditions and that there is barely enough food and resources to go around. I can't really disagree with the government's decision, although the program (as portrayed) could have been carried out with more sensitivity.
    Our protagonist leaves her husband secretly and without warning. At first I assumed he was abusive or otherwise horrific. But no, it is later revealed that the two had been in love and then they grew apart because he was able to adjust and make do in his new life, and she refused to, insisting on hanging on to anger and resentment. She was angry at him for not maintaining the revolutionary political ideals that he held as a college student - basically, for growing up. Maybe this means I have become old and stodgy (I prefer to think of myself as adaptable), but I identified more with the husband than with her.
    Then, hitchhiking, our protagonist has an encounter with a man in a van. Basically, he makes a pass at her. He doesn't threaten her with rape - but she acts like he does. The whole thing is a little weird.
    Our protagonist reaches her goal, and after some tribulation, joins the female survivalist group she was intending on joining up with. The narrator makes a big deal out of insisting that the group is not a cult and that its leader, Jackie, is not crazy. However, it is more than clear that (at least by my definitions) it IS a cult, and Jackie IS crazy. The behaviors of the women in the group are horribly disturbing. Personally, anyone that beat me up, broke my bones and imprisoned me till I was on the verge of death would NEVER be getting called "Sister" by me. Under Jackie's crazed leadership, the cult gradually gets more militarily inclined, and things come to a head when Jackie decides to morph it into a true terrorist group. Some women are shown as seeing this for what it is, and they leave. Jackie then murders a couple of people who take off - something that is accepted as "necessary" by our protagonist. Jackie has absolutely no plan about how to improve the lot of England (except maybe that farming is good?), but decides to incite armed rebellion.
    After that, I really thought that the author was trying to talk about how people can be led to accept horrible, unethical actions; led into violence... It is true that the women of Carhullan did make a better life for themselves (well, at least they had better food... they still had an awful lot of rules and hierarchy going on). But then in the author interview she was talking about "strong, capable women.. shaking off oppression.." and I'm like "What?! That's not the book I just read, Ms. Hall!"
    It is still an interesting book though, because it leads the reader to consider the two different societies posited here - the repressive, crowded welfare state that still clings to traditional values that "Sister" runs from, and the repressive, hardworking, sex-segregated (it's mostly women, with a few men down the road) military-style camp that she runs to. Neither are shown as lovely options. But I think that Hall sees a lot more value in the latter than I do. I would prefer the first, with the option of working from the inside to demand more personal freedoms & rights from the 'Authority' - maybe not a goal that would be likely to succeed - but one with far more chance of succeeding than armed rebellion ending in mass bloodshed.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel can be summed up more or less accurately as a portrayal of what second wave feminism would look like if it were not a movement of theory, but a paramilitary insurgency. The plot revolves around an unnamed protagonist in a dystopian England who finds herself confined by the rules and regulations and dreary life under the hand of the Authority. Humiliated and ashamed of a contraceptive coil she is forced to have implanted within her, she finds her resentment growing, until she flees to a commune of sorts in the northern area. Here she finds a group of women who subsist in a libertarian system, though led by the founder, a charismatic woman named Jackie Nixon.

    And here is where many reviewers seem to be torn. The first two-thirds of the book clearly revolve more around feminist theory: the women are portrayed as being more comfortable with themselves, eager to work and speak up and be heard; Hall specifically condemns those who think "cattiness" is somehow innate to feminine nature and that women have to have a masculine influence around or somehow we'll wither and die. The book also dips more into second wave feminism at this point, as it celebrates lesbian relationships and criticizes the handful of men who live on a neighboring farm.

    The final third, however, becomes much more bloody and real.

    Hall writes Jackie Nixon convincingly. Too often, leaders are portrayed as being perfect, which feels fake, but Nixon is clearly a flawed character. She is stubborn, willful, and not a little bloodthirsty; as is so often the case, however, these eccentricities do not detract from her charisma, but give it a sense of realism. Often the most beloved leaders, the ones most celebrated, are just a little off.

    Nixon hears news that the Authority is planning on invading the farm and rousting its inhabitants, forcing them to live under the same oppressive rule they fled from, and here Hall forces the reader to make a choice: do we believe Nixon? The reader's opinion influences how they feel about the rest of the book. Other women back Nixon's story up, but they are all part of her elite group, and it is continually shown that she is somewhat revered, a leader of women, someone who makes them feel like more than they are, that they are part of something. The unnamed protagonist, who has idolized Nixon since she was a little girl, feels the same way. Nixon proposes striking first, in a moving speech about the responsibilities of liberty. Others feel that they should continue as they have been and hope they are left alone. Again, who you agree with hinges more than a little on whether you believe Nixon is telling the truth, and for every clue that she is (concurring reports), there is also evidence that she may not (several times her bloodthirsty and restless nature is mentioned, as well as implications she may not be entirely stable).

    The protagonist, known only as Sister, joins in Nixon's cause, and we see that these are the true Daughters of the North, not the commune itself. These daughters seem wild, unearthly, sprung up from the ground itself instead of born from fathers and mothers. They are hard, ruthless, and single-minded.

    The central question is whether or not the cause is just, not the leader. Nixon is changeable and often cruel: she conducts midnight raids on the women, tortures them in a tiny chamber, and even kills two who try to escape. One woman protests that Sister has been groomed since she arrived for this purpose and Nixon is manipulating them - which may very well be true. Early on in the book, and quite tellingly, Sister relays a conversation she had with her father where he says, "It doesn't do to rely on those in charge completely." Just because Jackie's system is not as overtly oppressive as the Authority does not mean that she is not in charge. Nixon is portrayed as the perfect rebellion leader: she gives moving speeches about liberty, she reads profusely and has experience, she exudes a charisma which bespells those who follow her quite willingly. But whether or not she is on the right side of it is quite a different matter.

    The book is compelling, not shying away from complexities or ambiguities - no one is completely in the right. The Authority is abusing human rights, Nixon is clearly spoiling for a war. Are they both meant to be wrong? Is there a point when we have to accept that nonviolent resistance is not feasible in every conflict?

    Whether or not you agree with the methods used, or even some of the more radical aspects of the feminist theory lying underneath, Hall has beautiful prose that somehow ties beautiful descriptions with thematic intensity. One of the most gorgeous examples of this is when Sister is training. She comments: "My whole life I had loved the upland terrain, deriving simple pleasure from it as a child - the views, the changing colours of the slopes, the brackish rivers - and though for years I had seen it at only a distance, I had often thought of the landscape as I stood beside the conveyor at the factory; it was a place of beauty and escape. Now I stumbled across its gills and over its marshland, bending to meet the wind when it roared against me, and dragging myself up by the scars by handfuls of heather and thorn bushes, by any firm hold. And still, I could not say it wasn't beautiful. Despite its austerity, its vast and cowing expanse, and the agony of its traverse, it seemed more beautiful than ever."

    Here, again, we see that these women are from the Earth itself, from the North that gave them birth.

    If you are at all interested in feminism, dystopian worlds, complex and subtle stories of power, this is a wonderful book to read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    How apt to our time, more so now than ever. I don't understand all the negative reviews this book got and comparing it to The Handmaid's Tale just seems lazy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I was last at Jessa's I reclaimed a few of my own books from her collection before her move to Germany, and at the same time she pressed this one on me, saying I'd really like it. A few days ago, I was searching for a book to read while I'd misplaced Fear and Trembling, so I grabbed this one.

    She was right! I was drawn in right from the beginning, to the point that some of Sister's anger and frustration spilled over into my (male-filled) life when I was forced to put the book down for a while. Sunday I plowed through the rest of the book despite Andrew being gone and my needing to watch Jefferson all day.

    In this near-future dystopian vision, global warming has raised coastlines and temperatures, the economy has crashed, people have been herded into urban centers, and England is engaged in some unnamed war with far flung enemies. All women are fitted with contraceptive "regulators," subject to surprise inspection, and reproduction is by lottery. One woman finally has enough, so she flees her "official" existence in search of a women's community high in the mountains that she's been fascinated with since childhood, but has little idea if it still exists....

    In many ways this book is the opposite of Door Into Ocean's Sharer world -- with incidents of torture, military training, and the final violent uprising, but in both books the women are wiry, strong, self-sufficient, living at harmony with their ecosystem, and in control. Could the women of Carhullan have staged a successful non-violent campaign of resistance? It's hard to say.

    Both worlds have strong representations of women, and also people of color (perhaps Daughters more pointedly in the case of the latter.) Daughters also speaks strongly to the kind of power and self-control so alluring in glossy ads for the military. Of course, the Sharers also had that strength, though they went about completely different means to achieve it.

    In the end, it is perhaps startling how much the two groups of women have in common.

    Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This novel was ok, but I felt a little let down - I was expecting much better from an author shortlisted for the Booker, although maybe my expectations were part of the problem.

    It started off well, and the concept of the dystopian society she creates is intriguing and a bit frightening. Some of the events and ideas, like the contraceptive coils, make you think about where society may be heading. Overall, Hall writes well, but I found myself a little bored with her descriptions. There are scenes where she definitely suffers from telling-instead-of-showing-syndrome. I just couldn't really bring myself to care very much about the protagonist, Sister, or really any of the other characters.

    The ending was pretty anti-climactic, and felt like a cop-out - you'll see what I mean when you get there. Overall it wasn't very powerful, which is something I would expect from a dystopian novel like this. I anticipated something really thought-provoking that would have me lying awake the next three nights thinking about it, but this one just didn't do it. It starts off strong, but loses is punch along the way.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I’d been after a copy of this for a while, so I was pretty chuffed when I found this one in a charity shop. I had high hopes too of the novel, as it had been repeatedly recommended to me, but initially I wondered if it had been over-praised. It’s structured as segments of found testimony by Sister, who leaves her husband to join a women’s militia based at a remote farm. In the near-future UK of the book, the economy has crashed, the US sends aid, and an oppressive political regime is tightening its grip on an already downtrodden and poor population. Once Sister reaches Carhullan, the militia’s farm, the story picks up, and when she is recruited to the women’s army which is planning a coup on a local town, then it really moves into gear. By the end of the novel, I was much more impressed than I had been after the first dozen or so pages. On balance, definitely worth its position on the Clarke Award shortlist (and arguably better than the eventual winner).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's dystopian and depressing in a good way. It's similar in tone (but not plot, characters) and environment to 'Children of Men'.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It is dated. It is clichéd. It wants to be much more than it really is. It is - in terms of the actual prose - well written with descriptive and engaging writing.It's the plot - and the characters' motivations - where it falls flat. Instead of being a story about 'something', it reads like a feminist creative thesis from the 1980s. It's a Handmaid's Tale wannabe.The activities of the people in power are presented like they are horrendous... but if you skip the feminist hysteria behind it, it was a logical progression of behavior when society collapses - at least the women weren't kept for breeding or community sexual relief purposes. I guess I might be desensitized due to the number of post-apocalyptic books I've read, but this one was not nearly as dire as the author wants us to think it is. In fact, I think in a post-apocalypse the fact that you have to eat tin meat from the U.S. or have sex with your husband is probably the least of your worries.Overall, I'm glad it's now off my to-read list. But I don't think I'll be picking up any feminist 101 novels any time soon.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Extremely well-written: sharp, punchy, biting. I really like the liberal usage of dialect terms too.

    The characters are tough but not unrealistically so; there are moments of tenderness or togetherness (in particular, the scene where the protagonist is accepted into the community brought an actual lump to my throat).
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Disappointing. I wish she had given more info on why things were the way they were. The narrative just seemed detached. And then she just leaves out the end of the book. Seriously, what we're building up to for the first 200 pages is just glossed over.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If you care about hetero femme problems you will like this book better than I did.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Even though this is a fairly short novel, my main criticism has to be that it's overwritten. I had the impression that this was a novel that really wanted to be a short story. It's set in the near future, after economic and environmental disaster have led to the establishment of an authoritarian government in England (called, appropriately enough, the Authority). The narrator, known only as Sister, escapes her dreary life to join a commune of women sustaining themselves on a farm in the remote north.The idea isn't a terribly original one, but that doesn't matter as much as the execution, which was just a bit lacking. Hall tends to repeat herself, to over-explain at some parts and to strain our suspension of disbelief at others. This reader was left not quite believing the story. The cover states that this novel echoes The Handmaid's Tale and Children of Men, but Daughters of the North comes off as a pale imitation of its forebears.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Two stars for now. It starts off very, very slowly. Agonizingly slow. I love dystopia novels so I will give it another read in a few months. The idea of women escaping a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world to create a conclave is intriguing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It would seem odd to complain about the harshness and brutality of a novel that has the word "army" in the title, particularly one described as a "dystopian" novel on the jacket notes. So I won't complain about those qualities, I shall merely flag up that they are there. Hall is a skilful writer who in this instance has penned a work that may, sadly, turn out to be just as prescient as Orwell's 1984. A strong but disturbing read (and hence the three stars).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "The Carhullan Army" is a feminist dystopia set in the Lake District of the UK, a few decades in to the future, when climate change and peak oil have combined to collapse British society into a sub-Orwellian autocracy. The protagonist escapes (surprisingly easily) from this society and makes her way to the all-woman farm Carhullan, high in the mountains. It turns out that Jackie, the leader of Carhullan, has more on her mind than remaining separate from the system: she wants to destroy it.This book has a lot of good points: the description of the landscape and of the the workings of the farm are both excellent. But the ending, which should have been dramatic, is botched, so rushed that most of the impact of the climax is lost.This book has been compared with "The Handmaid's Tale", but I think a much closer comparison is with Suzy McKee Charnas's superb "Holdfast Chronicles" series - "Walk to the End of the World" and its sequels. Unfortunately, despite its promising start, "The Carhullan Army" is nowhere near as good.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sarah Hall is one of Britain's newest literary stars and this is a great read. It was over much too quickly for me as I read it in a day. In a Britain sometime in the future, ravaged by environmental disaster and war, much of the country is underwater and life for the survivors is harsh. The government has been replaced by a repressive Authority and all women are required to be fitted with contraceptive devices. In a remote area of Cumbria, a group of woman live on a fortified communal farm outside the contol of the Authority and "Sister" is determined to escape her harsh life and join them. This is her story
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is the bastard child of The Handmaid's Tale and V for Vendetta. And unlike those two, it fails to overwhelm - or even convince.I find it hard to extrapolate today's Britain into the society Hall sees in 30 years' time. Peak oil and environmental crisis or not, something seriously jars about her vision. So with the basic premise struggling to establish credibility, the rest of the book falls somewhat flat. I can't quite follow the main character's motivation to escape the struggling and oppressive society she lives in. There are plenty of reasons to not want to be part of that society before we get to the reproductive freedom issues that seem to push her. (Yes, I know, I'm a bad feminist, no biscuit.) I completely failed to connect emotionally with any of the characters. Maybe if Hall had spent less than 50 pages out of 200-page novel on the Cumbrian landscape and somewhat more on her characters, that would have helped. I also fail to find most of the aspects of the novel which are clearly meant to shock (and, judging by the blurbs on the back cover clearly have shocked the - dare I hazard a guess? male? - reviewers) in any way shocking. Can women fight? Yes, of course we can. Can they be aggressive? Hell, yeah. Can they, using the same brainwashing tactics we use on male soldiers, be turned into an army. Gosh, it's almost like it's supposed to be a revelation that women are human, too!The thing that I find most uncomfortable (and I'll probably get in trouble with some second-gen feminists over this) is that this book is clearly rooted in 1970s radical feminism, and that in 2008 it was judged worthy of a Tiptree, when Y The Last Man was not.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting feminist manifesto, set in a near-future Britain after the fall of the government and the establishment of totalitarian rule. The protagonist sets out at her peril to seek a secret outsider community of women who retain their isolated independence.I was interested all the way through. But then, I love this sort of post-authority quasi-post-apocalyptic dystopian theme. Not a must-read, nor the best book of its type, but I liked it. If you like feminist dystopian fiction (and who doesn't?), you might have a look.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not the greatest book on the subject, but also not the worst. Hall gets points for not having her main character raped at the beginning of the book. However, points off, so to speak, for leaving the circumstances of the "crisis" Britain seems to be in so vague--floods, lack of fuel, etc.--sure, we can extrapolate somewhat, but I like my end-of-the-world dystopias a bit more fleshed out. For example, why fit all the women with birth control? To save resources, presumably. But is the abuse of women via checking that the birth control is still "installed" something that's mandated by the government, or is it just the usual abuse of power by people who have none? In other words, has a decision been made at some point that women are "officially" second-class citizens?What I guess I'm saying is, the book lacks context. A similar work, World Made by Hand, lacks information but doesn't seem as enclosed as this one; within its covers, its lack of knowledge about the rest of the world makes sense. In Daughters of the North, while there is an information blackout, there also seems to be a lack of curiosity about what's going on in the larger world. The book is very self-contained, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Perhaps that sense of enclosure is meant to contribute to the confessional format of the book, which didn't work well for me.One might say I'm hard to please, but with collapse-of-civilization novels running a dime a dozen these days, I can afford to be picky.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Set in a near-future Britain in which a huge climate change has caused a change to a despotic and misogynist regime, a young woman escapes her repressive life in the town of Rith—where she is forced into mindlessly futile and backbreaking labor, made to live in a communal building cheek-by-jowl with too many other civilians, force-fitted with a painful contraceptive device and subject to random and humiliating checks by authorities to make sure she has the contraceptive device in—for a female-only agrarian compound some thirty miles outside of town, in the wilds. Her initial violent treatment at the compound, known as Carhullan, makes her wonder if she’s done the right thing after all. However, once the women there trust her, she is set free and cared for until she regains her strength. Her name is taken from her and she is given the new name of “Sister” as she is assimilated, acculturated, and indoctrinated into Carhullan’s inner ranks by the charismatic and volatile leader of the women, Jackie Nixon. Finally, Sister has found the warm and supportive community she dreamed about during her joyless life under the Authority’s thumb in Rith.However, the outside world must intrude, as it always does. Jackie intercepts radio transmissions and knows that the Authority is planning to raid and assimilate all those rogue communities like their own, and she decides to strike first and conquer Rith in an attempt to inspire a nation-wide revolt.The ending is a bit too abrupt and the philosophy and poltical messages are s bit heavy-handed at times, but this novel invites favorable comparisons to Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” A great choice for those who like their political messages unambiguous, their women tough, and their dystopias bleak indeed.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel absolutely lives up to the tradition of Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson. A dystopian, futuristic British society, a la "V for Vendetta" and the main character, known only as "Sister", desires to find the city of Carhullan. A farming community comprised only of women with a militaristic underbelly, that comes to the forefront as new information about the changes and updates from the government reaches the group. The book serves as a type of difficult to read observation of the potential future of democratic society in the continuing wake of of things like CCTV and the Patriot Act.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel was ok, but I felt a little let down - I was expecting much better from an author shortlisted for the Booker, although maybe my expectations were part of the problem.It started off well, and the concept of the dystopian society she creates is intriguing and a bit frightening. Some of the events and ideas, like the contraceptive coils, make you think about where society may be heading. Overall, Hall writes well, but I found myself a little bored with her descriptions. There are scenes where she definitely suffers from telling-instead-of-showing-syndrome. I just couldn't really bring myself to care very much about the protagonist, Sister, or really any of the other characters. The ending was pretty anti-climactic, and felt like a cop-out - you'll see what I mean when you get there. Overall it wasn't very powerful, which is something I would expect from a dystopian novel like this. I anticipated something really thought-provoking that would have me lying awake the next three nights thinking about it, but this one just didn't do it. It starts off strong, but loses is punch along the way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set mostly in NW England in a women's community high in the fells. Sister has escaped from her life in Rith (could that be shorthand for Penrith?) where the administration interferes in many aspects of life for inhabitants who are crowded together in limited accomodation with little privacy. For example she was required to have a contraceptive device inserted and on one occasion was picked up by a patrol and "inspected" to check it was still present. The community at Carhullan is in transition from being simply an alternative way of life to being a military force which is set to seize control of Rith and oppose the authorities.

Book preview

Daughters of the North - Sarah Hall

FILE ONE

COMPLETE RECOVERY

My name is Sister.

This is the name that was given to me three years ago. It is what the others called me. It is what I call myself. Before that, my name was unimportant. I can’t remember it being used. I will not answer to it now, or hear myself say it out loud. I will not sign to acknowledge it. It is gone. You will call me Sister.

I was the last woman to go looking for Carhullan.

It was a wet rotting October when I left. In the town the leaves had begun to drop and their yellow pulp lay on the ground. The last belts of thunderstorms and downpours were passing through the Northern region. Summer was on its way out. The atmosphere felt as if it was finally breaking apart, and at night and in the mornings something cooler had set in. It was a relief not to wake up sweating under the sheet in our room in the terrace quarters, coming out of some hot nightmare with milky dampness on my chest. I have always slept better in the winter. It feels like my pulse runs slower then.

This freshness seemed to cleanse the town too. The bacterial smell of the refinery and fuel plants began to disperse at night when the clouds thinned and the heat lifted. Each year after the Civil Reorganisation summer’s humidity had lasted longer, pushing the colder seasons into a smaller section of the calendar, surrounding us constantly with the smog of rape and tar-sand burning off, and all of us packed tightly together like fish in a smoking shed.

The change of temperature brought with it a feeling of excitement, an alertness that went beyond nerves or the heightened awareness of the risks I knew I was taking. It was restorative. The cool reminded me of my childhood. Back then the weather had been more distinct, separated. Some older people in the factory where I worked said of all the English traditions to have been compromised, the weather was the saddest. As if there had been a choice of some kind, a referendum for these semi-tropics.

I still recall the fresh ticking of hail on my face in March as I stood to catch the bus for school. And autumn blusters, when objects large and small were bellowed back and forth. The deep-vein chill of January; my hands and feet numb under fleece and wool. You don’t fear possibility when you are young. You don’t believe the world can really be broken or that anything terrible will happen during your lifetime.

Even the rain is different now; erratic, violent, not the constant grey drizzle of old postcards, jokes, and television reports. It’s rain that feels wounded. There is seldom any snow on the fells, though people in the town look for it out of habit.

Where I was going the altitude was high, it was remote, and part of me hoped that if I stayed there long enough I would see those white drifts again.

I left at dawn, so I could get out of Rith without being noticed. My rucksack was packed light enough to carry a long distance, then on, up into the mountains. I was not bringing much away with me–clothes, boots, some tins of food and squares of rusk, a canister of water, a medical kit in case the regulator could be taken out of me, though I didn’t know if that would be possible. And I had an old Second World War rifle, packed between the jumpers and waterproofs; its stunted barrel nuzzled against the top flap. This was what I planned to bargain with at Carhullan.

I had hidden the bag in an alleyway behind our building the previous night so I could get down the stairs without the extra weight, without bumping and scraping the walls on my descent. It was pushed into an alcove behind the main chamber of the rain tank where it was dark and dry. I’d put it there while the families in the other quarters were eating dinner, and before my husband got back from his shift, checking the void first with a stick to make sure there were no rats’ nests.

In the early morning I left our bed without waking Andrew and dressed quietly in the communal bathroom. I’d stowed a plastic bag in the pocket of my trousers to collect the items I needed. There was a new packet of soap on the shelf belonging to the family in the next room, and I took that too, slipping it into the bag with my toothpaste, deodorant, a razor and some blades. I paused for a moment before opening the little medicine cabinet they used. There was some aspirin, a packet of sanitary towels, and a sachet of powder for treating cystitis that was long out of date. I gathered them up. Then I made my way along the hall and down the stairs.

Outside the door of the building I waited a minute or two to be sure that Andrew had not heard me leaving, trying to be calm. My heart was sending fast volleys of blood up through my chest. I could feel the contact and back-turn of pulse in my fingertips. I told myself it would be OK. In the last month I had trained myself to wake early and had practised this departure. Always I’d made it out silently and safely, then I’d walked around the dark town, careful to avoid the patches where the feral dogs roamed, before coming home again. But this was not a dry run. I breathed deeply, blew the air out, and waited. The last thing I wanted was to have Andrew following me down, calling me crazy, creating a fuss and waking the people above. He would never have let me go off with a packed bag, out of the official zones, even though we were at odds now, hateful or silent towards each other.

I was tied to this building. He knew it, and I knew it. There were no other options for us. And if he’d discovered me, he would have pulled me back upstairs, or held me down in the road as I struggled, until a monitor from the Authority arrived, perhaps making an excuse for my behaviour, saying I was high, or had had a nightmare. He would have told me to wait it out, saying no matter how bad things were now, we could get through it, and then we could part company when everything was less fraught, less dangerous.

I leant on the terrace wall and listened for his footsteps this last time. The only sound I could hear from above was the waspish hum of the energy meter on standby. I looked up. The sky was the dun colour of bitumen, like the shale turning in the vats at the refinery where Andrew worked. There was a white smear of moon, a ridged and filmy ulcer in the lining of cloud. There were no lights on yet in Rith, and none would come on until the morning power allotment at six, when people would have time to heat water and food, and could watch the early news for bulletins from one of the fronts and the lottery numbers. By then I was planning to be long gone.

After a few minutes I went to the alley and collected my bag. I knew I had to move quickly now, without over-thinking. Usually the town was dead at this hour, but it was possible to run into an Authority cruiser. The thought of it made me sick. I wouldn’t stand a chance of explaining myself to them. And I didn’t want to contemplate what I was doing, and falter in it, though I was sure now that I would not. Not after the last few weeks. I walked through the town, away from the combined residences, past the old shopping centre with its boarded windows, and the turbine warehouse where the metal hulls were stacked up waiting for dispatch, as they had been for years. The streets were deserted and everything was quiet. Only the glaze of the old red masonry, the slates, and the tarmac reflected any light, showing a version of the settlement that seemed ghostly and unmodern.

It was hard to imagine all the people behind the bricks, sleeping two and three to a room, or lying awake, talking softly so as not to disturb the other families. Some of them crying, being comforted or ignored. Some not caring who heard them through the walls, pushing away from a sore body as the hits of cheap ephedrine began to wear off. Each time I had ventured out in preparation, these dawns seemed to have an atmosphere of reduction, as if there had been a cull, not a condensing of the people.

On the end of each row of terraces were the silhouettes of meters, small buzzing cysts that had been designed to read the flow of energy from photovoltaic tiles. Now, they were being used to regulate consumption from the old domestic power grid. There had been few improvements made after Reorganisation. The ten-year recovery plan was becoming a hopeless myth. It was hard not to look behind me, back the way I had come, to see if there was anyone there, following, or just watching me go. I made myself not turn round. I told myself the best way for me to keep going was to give my eyes one simple option–forward.

There was a soft crackle in the sky and the drag of thunder to the west. I knew it would rain sometime soon, that I’d have to stop and put on my waterproofs. But I could not afford to pause while I was still inside the perimeter. Maybe later, when I was clear of the place and warm from the walk, I would strip down. I knew that I would dry more quickly than my clothing.

For years I had not been out of Rith. No civilian had, unless they were being transported to a detention centre. The zones did not allow for transference. The original register bound people to their areas at the time of the collapse. Only government agents and the Authority had any need to travel, or the means to do it, and then it was usually by train.

It was my hometown and I was familiar with the surroundings–the steep streets and welter of roofs, the Beacon Hill, and opposite, on a twin tor, the castle. I kept on, along the old motorway flyover. Beneath it were heaps of scrap and rubbish, and I could hear rustling animal sounds. Past the settlement border, in the lower areas, the roads had deteriorated. They were much worse than I had imagined. In their years of redundancy they had sagged and rucked. Whole sections had been pulled away by the floods. They felt loose underfoot, like scree. In places there were small craters full of rainwater; I stumbled into them, soaking my trousers up over my boots to the knee. I realised it was true what people said at the factory and in quarter meetings. Nothing was being repaired except the arterial routes used by the Authority.

To begin with I jogged where I could, concentrating hard so as not to trip or turn an ankle, and pacing myself for what would be a long hard day. After half an hour I reached the rise where the white tollhouse stood. Its windows were out and the roof had given at one of the gables. I remembered from a local history lesson that it had been burnt down twice by the Scots, then rebuilt. Now it was almost a ruin again. The owners must have long since moved into Rith, with all the other outer-lying residents.

Down the hill, a little further on, the old Yanwath traffic bridge was still intact. I had driven over it many times before the travel ban. The signal that had once controlled it was dead; the glass lights black with dirt and its post askew in its concrete bed. Where the road dipped down before rising to the bridge’s abutment, water pooled and eddied. There was debris afloat in it, mostly indistinguishable, perhaps lumps of render from the houses upstream. I forded it, walked to the middle of the span and peered over the parapet. Below, the river Eden was brown and swollen and slipping past with frightening speed. In the half-dark I saw the bright movement of its edges, the backwash of white caps and whirlpools. It had broken its banks in the rains, spilling into the ditches and gardens on either side. I could hear the lower branches creaking as the trees along its sides were stripped of leaves.

The cottages next to the bridge were window-deep in the current. There was a strong odour of wet mortar, fabric and silt. It was the familiar smell of flooded homes; the riverbed slurrying up house walls, rotting curtains and carpets. It was the smell I had woken to over a decade ago, when I had come downstairs to find my house full of litter and sewage.

I knew the road on the other side of the bridge led away through a small empty village, into the green abandoned wilds of what used to be national parkland–the place my father’s generation had called the Lake District.

By the time the vehicle appeared it was midday, and raining hard. At first I thought the noise was just water, moving heavily in the air or through underground channels beneath the road. Then I heard a shift of gears. I jumped up onto the verge and turned round, half-expecting to see the dark blue shape of a cruiser and ready to duck behind the wall. A white civilian van was coming towards me, making its way slowly along the derelict road. Its suspension looked loose and amplified, as if the body had been raised from the chassis somehow, and it rocked slackly over the ridges and potholes. The windows were filthy with dirt, seedpods, and leaves that had been shaken from the trees in the latest slew. Behind it was a waft of greasy brown exhaust. It passed me by, then slowed, and finally stopped. Nervous, I walked up to the driver’s door; the window squeaked down.

‘Where are you off to then, lass?’ The man had a red face like a daub of glass taken out of a furnace. His pale eyes ran over me. I was a mess. My hair was dripping, and the old white tank top I had on was sopping and clinging to my skin. I shrugged my shoulders forward and lifted my arms over my chest to cover up. He laughed. His teeth were rotten along their edges. Each tooth had a dull yellow plateau at its tip and around his gum line was a telltale seam of silver. ‘Well, a spot of hiking it looks like. Last of the Wainwrights, are you? Or maybe you want to be the first one up onto the tops again. Plant a flag. Things must be improving in town if that’s the case. Come on. Best you get in.’

I hesitated. I hadn’t wanted to get involved with anyone on the way, and I knew questions might mean trouble, but my shoulders and feet were aching and I did not pause for long. I walked around the back of the van to the passenger side, pulling the wet material off my chest and wringing it out. He leant over and opened the door for me, like my father always used to when he drove me to school. He’d put a dirty-looking rag on the seat to keep it dry. I lay my rucksack on the floor of the cabin and climbed in. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Good timing this, isn’t it?’

He put the van into gear and pulled away. It felt strange.

I had not been in a car for years. I’d handed my keys and personal information in along with everyone else, and I’d forgotten what it was like to be in control of a vehicle, to be enclosed but free to go anywhere. Watching him dip the clutch and flick on the wiper blades felt like a dream or a lost memory. The smell in the cabin was strong, tart, like old clothes, vinegar mixed with urine, or maybe it was the unwashed smell of the man himself. But I didn’t complain or make a move to wind the passenger window down. I was glad just to be out of the rain.

The soles of my feet were already tender, though I had on two thick pairs of socks. I felt the prickle of pins and needles start up in the ends of them and I curled and flexed my toes. I had not expected a ride from anyone. I’d been practising walking for months when I wasn’t on my shift, aimlessly at first, as if to pass the time, and then with purpose, looping round Rith’s periphery, up the hill to the Beacon and back down again. There was no crime in that, just walking, though Andrew thought it stupid to risk the dogs that scavenged around town, rooting for food in the tips. They were filthy and distempered, he said, and I was asking to get bitten. Occasionally there were attacks, but none of them fatal. I had not been able to wear my bag on any of these occasions; it would have been too suspicious, and it was a shock to my body, the weight of it.

I’d made sure to eat well all week; two portions of rice instead of one, sardines for breakfast, even though it took the box of provisions low, and Andrew would suffer for it for the rest of the month. I was as fit and as fed as I could be. But turning circuits round the citadel in the dim morning and eating extra cans of fish was one thing; hauling out to the abandoned park with my possessions on my back was altogether another. I’d come about twelve miles and I was sore. The bag on my back had been pulling down hard and my spine felt compressed. Showers had been coming and going for hours, the hems of my clothes were damp and chafing. Every step took me further away from the town and out towards my own limits. The appearance of any vehicle was unlikely, almost miraculous, and I was thankful for it.

The van pitched and swayed around bends in the road, the man taking corners wide to avoid obstacles, holes, and bales of undergrowth that had burst out of the verge. I put my palms on the seat either side of my legs to brace myself and stayed quiet. I didn’t want to make conversation or have to navigate an interview that could perhaps be reported back. Every once in a while the man looked over at me and sniffed. I could tell he wanted to talk more than listen anyway. He had the air of someone cabin-fevered, cut-off. He must have a work-station out of the zone, I thought.

‘So. Have they lifted the restrictions, then?’ he finally asked. ‘You’re the first one I’ve seen in, God, I don’t know how long. Quite a buzz it was, seeing you on the road up ahead. I thought the bloody hock had got me seeing things.’ He pointed to a small silver bottle in one of the moulded wells on the dashboard, and offered me a swig. I shook my head and put my feet on top of the rucksack to keep it from rolling about as the van ploughed through the shallows of a stream. The chassis grated on the stony bottom, scraping hard, so it sounded as if we were shovelling up pebbles. The man stamped on the clutch, shifted to a low gear and revved the engine high.

There seemed to be new becks everywhere, spilling out of the walls and fields. When the tyres gained traction again he eased off. He repeated the question. ‘They’ve been lifted for me, yes,’ I said. I tried not to sound anxious or furtive. I looked over at him, thinking that, for all his talk of hiking, he had probably guessed something was wrong anyway; me alone on the road, having ranged so far out of town, and with no apparent way back. I waited for him to challenge me.

He pointed to my rucksack. ‘Have you got a tent in there? Cause you’ll not be getting back for a bit. I’m going to Rosgill and then on to Blackrigg. You’ll be all right if you’ve still got people out here. I’d probably know them, I know everyone that’s stayed. Only a handful left, if that. Most have been struck off, daft buggers, but not me–I work up the reservoir, at the draw-off tower. There’s not much to do, just sit about and work the sluice. I’ve got a permit and a priority quota for the van; it’s all official, like. I’m doing my bit for the recovery. No one else is much in and out these days, just me when I pick up my supplies, or come for an engineer, and I won’t be off again for a good three weeks, maybe more. You were lucky I was passing when I was.’

I was lucky. I knew that. If I rode with him to Rosgill he would save me fifteen blistered miles. He rattled off a short list of local people who had been stubborn enough to stay, as if I might volunteer to some relation, and then began to complain about the ever-tightening allocation of fuel and the lack of fresh rations in his blue box. ‘UHT milk, I bloody hate it,’ he said. ‘Tastes like cock-wash, doesn’t it? Excuse my manners. It’s what we get for shafting the farmers, though, all that centralisation nonsense. When we need them, they’ve all been put out of business.’ I let him talk, trying to keep my head clear and my mind focused.

The original plan had been to leave Rith as early as possible and walk the whole way. If I kept a good pace and didn’t rest too long I thought I could be close by dusk. I’d looked at an old OS map that Andrew kept in one of the boxes under the bed, and it seemed feasible in a day, or at most a day and a half, though the last bit looked steep, tightly hatched with contours as it was. It was going to hurt, getting there. But it would be worth it. When I got to the farm everything would be better. The women would see to that.

In all the weeks of planning, I hadn’t contemplated the possibility that they would be gone. Or worse, that they would turn me away. I hadn’t given those ideas any room for development, fearing they would throw me off course. The only thing left for me was to hope. It was hope that nourished me day after day, in a way the imported canned food never would. The reality was that I could not be sure of the reception I’d get at Carhullan, what I would find there and who. But I was unwilling to believe the place would now be empty, that they’d have given up. I knew if I’d let those thoughts stay with me, I never would have set off.

No genuine rural reports had been broadcast for at least five years. It wasn’t in the interest of the Authority to issue them. Their circulars never made mention of the other half of the landscape, the other half of Britain. Occasionally some diehard would turn up on Rith’s outskirts, a rider on a pony, a customised bike, or on foot, but they only came to see what developments were being made, to stare at the New Fuel factories, the Uncon oil refinery, or

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