This dystopian fable is a critique of our current fractured world

FICTION
The Emergency
George Packer
Picador, $34.99

With Donald J. Trump back in office as president of the United States, as he renews his injections of steroids into his Make America Great Again agenda to change the American people and the world, dystopia is the distemper of our times.

George Orwell and 1984 has been with us, in the postwar shadows of fascism and communism, for decades. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, became a political and social literary nightmare of this century. They are both horror fables that haunt these times and are more popular than ever.

George Packer, one of the leading journalists of our time, has joined the party. He is known to readers of The New Yorker and The Atlantic for his exceptionally deep reporting on foreign policy, defence and national security issues. With his books on the Iraq war, 9/11, the heavyweight players and changing politics in America, Packer helps us better understand this era, which increasingly looks more and more like the 1930s, a decade marked by trade wars, anti-immigrant nativism, and authoritarian powers wantonly seizing territory from sovereign nations. That appears where we are headed. We know how that decade ended. And it is scary as hell.

Packer’s dystopic tale is different from the classics. Not more benign, but less viciously threatening in its execution. It is not as taut as other nightmare stories.

In The Emergency, the Empire disintegrates and its power and presence collapses. In the capital city, the Burghers, who have been the privileged ruling class, come slowly under siege from the Yeoman, the farmers and workers who live in the countryside and have provided food, goods and services to the privileged. Hugo Rustin, a resolute senior doctor at the College Hospital, is confounded by the dissolution of all he and his elites have known. A movement, Together, principally driven by the young, including Rustin’s daughter, Selva, has spontaneously erupted and taken hold of the political culture. Selva buys in completely to the Together movement. Rustin’s wife, Annabelle, expresses sympathies for those who have no easy place in the turbulence and seeks more fulfillment outside their home.

Things slowly get worse everywhere. The quality of life declines. Rustin, who expected under the old regime to become director of the hospital, makes a surgical error, is called to account under Together values, and is stood down. He learns of a wounded man outside the city and embarks on a journey to Yeoman lands to find and heal him. He pursues this mission to show that the upheaval can be bridged. Selva – young, dynamic and well created by Packer – goes with him. They encounter a rural society degrading into primitive forms. There is violence.

The Yeoman barbarians at the city gates, to inflict grievous retribution on the Burghers, turn to a weapon of mass destruction. But it is so farcical – no spoiler alert here – that we reach the limits of what The Emergency can convey.

In this dystopia, there are a few things missing from the classics. There is no central authoritarian figure or power. No dictator. The rising up of the young is accompanied by magical themes and expressive rhetoric that bubble up out of nowhere – but which everyone spontaneously knows and knows how to express. Redistribution of wealth is not the main game. Collective power is. But to do what? We are in a low-tech world that feels like the 1950s. But there is no media – no TV or radio, much less digital – that functions as the propaganda sledgehammers that autocrats need to cement their power.

The Emergency is not the profound parable of these times. In his own words, Rustin is for “Science. Reason. Listening to the other side.” Hooray. To which a Yeoman, a man of the soil, says, “Burghers could never defeat Yeoman in war, but they found another way to bring us down, with words – books and schools – lies. Words messed up our minds and turned boys into girls … Yeoman lost our animal spirits, and we had nothing to live for.” MAGA redux.

In a recent essay, Packer writes that he conceived this novel, “As a fable, set in an unnamed place and time, the more remote, the better. Now that it is finished, there’s no barrier left between me and the facts. This excursion into fiction has restored my appetite for them.”

The crafting of The Emergency means that Packer’s excellent reporting will continue and help us better apprehend this ugly new world that is engulfing us.

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