APRIL is MORE 'Dystopian Britain Novels' Month
Book Review: 'Noah's Castle' by John Rowe Townsend
4 / 5 Stars
'Noah's Castle' first was published in 1975 in the UK by Oxford University Press. Various paperback editions were released, including a Puffin Books edition in 1980. The older editions are difficult to find and expensive. Both trade paperback and ebook editions from October Mist Publishing are available at amazon; I found the ebook to be well formatted and free of errors.
Author John Rowe Townsend (1922 - 2014) published a number of dramas and science fiction novels for young adults and children during the 1970s and 1980s. These novels were deliberate in their political framing; Townsend was an admirer of left-wing ideologies (as evidenced by his obituary in The Guardian).
'Noah's Castle' is set in the 1980s in an un-named city in the Midlands. First-person narrator Barry Mortimer is a teenager; he has an older sister, Nessie, a younger brother, Geoff, and a little sister named Ellen. Norman Mortimer, the family's patriarch, is the stereotypical postwar British male; something of a 'prig' (as the Brits put it), fussy, but also single-mindedly dedicated to the welfare of his family.
As the novel opens, it's September, and Norman has decided to purchase a 'white elephant' of a house, the eponymous Castle. The family are unimpressed with the house and its solid, but unattractive, construction, and its retiring, even discreet, location. Barry is unhappy with having to leave the modest but comfortable middle-class home the family has been occupying. But it turns out that Norman is a forward-thinking man: there are signs that the UK economy is collapsing. For the Mortimer family, the new home is a redoubt.
As the novel progresses, the family are bemused participants in Norman's plans to stock the cellar with 'survivalist' goods:
We went towards the nearest loaded shelf. The black polyethylene sheeting was tucked in at the edges under heavy, bulky objects. I drew it back unwillingly, apprehensively. There were cans on this shelf. Great big cans—cans of coffee, cans of drinking-chocolate, cans of peas and tomatoes, cans of stock essence—cans with familiar labels that I’d seen again and again in the shops, but bigger, giving a curious and alarming impression that they’d grown and might still be growing.
However, with the arrival of Winter, it becomes clear that Norman's foresight is of value. Author Townsend is skilled at depicting the liminal but ominous collapse of the British economy:
Mid-January. It was a cold, gray, iron-bound January—the kind of midwinter month when sidewalks and lawns and gravel alike seem jarringly hard underfoot and there’s no give in anything. But it was dry: no snow and not much rain. Talk among the grown-ups was the usual kind of talk but much more anxious. Prices were still soaring. (“It’s no lark,” said our witty English teacher.) Everything was now five times what it had been the previous summer, and the tickets in the shop windows seemed to change almost weekly. It seems odd now, but for a long time, the realities behind the talk and the figures didn’t sink in.
While the Mortimers are shielded from the worst of the privation accompanying the economic collapse, it's only a matter of time before knowledge of their secret larder seeps out into the increasingly lawless society beyond the driveway of Noah's Castle. And when that knowledge is loosed, there will be consequences......
I should make clear that 'Noah's Castle' is very much a 'British' novel, and one intended for a young adult readership. It's subdued, and devoid of the sort of violent action and gunplay that marks American treatments of societal collapse and the survivalist ethos (such as Andrew J. Offutt's 'The Castle Keeps'). In this, it is much like John Christopher's novel 'Pendulum' (1968), also about a middle-class family's response to a UK Gone Bad.
'Noah's Castle' is at heart a political allegory; as the narrative progresses, the reader observes Barry's burgeoning humanism, and his awareness of the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Will Barry succumb to the security of his father's 'family first' version of capitalism, or embrace socialism and the wisdom of the Collective, as exemplified by his friends in the 'Share Alike' community program ? I won't disclose spoilers, but Townsend provides an ending that is a little too 'safe,' one that side-steps the sharper edges of any discourse about political ideologies.
Readers comfortable with a contemplative treatment of societal collapse will find 'Noah's Castle' engaging, but it likely will disappoint if you're looking for a more action-centered examination of the topic.
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