The Wall
JOHN LANCHESTER
(FABER & FABER, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

John Lanchester is adept at forging a unique prose style for each novel he writes. His scintillating debut, The Debt to Pleasure, was narrated by an elegantly erudite psychopath; Capital, the story of the interlocking lives in a London street, was lively and polyphonous. The Wall is pared to the bone, spare and gritty, as befits a youthful narrator with barely an idea in his head beyond how to survive.

To begin with, Kavanagh only has to contend with cold and boredom. He is doing his turn on the Wall, a vast coastal boundary, 10,000 kilometres long, designed to keep out migrants. Rising sea levels have shrunk the global land mass, and it’s the job of Kavanagh and his fellow Defenders to repel those they call the Others. Told entirely from Kavanagh’s narrow perspective, the novel only rarely ventures into the “normal” life which is still apparently being lived inside the Wall. However, we learn that breeding is strictly controlled.