For some reason, I thought I’d read more Jesse Ball, only to realise that this is just my second dip into his oeuvre (I love that word). I did read Census and had conflicting thoughts about it. You can read those on Goodreads or this blog (assuming you’re not reading this on Facebook).

I loved The Repeat Room, though. It’s a dystopian novel, but one where Ball doesn’t care much about fleshing out his dystopia. He falls back on the sort of dystopian cliches—everyone has a designation, a value of their worth—that Orwell would recognise (I did chuckle at the fact that holograms have taken over most jobs). The central conceit is the one splash of originality. After a complex and byzantine selection process, a single juror judges an alleged criminal. To do so, they sit next to The Repeat Room (which houses the defendant), and while injected with drugs and wearing a weird helmet, they experience the crime through the criminal’s eyes.

If that’s all this novel was: a dystopian take on crime and punishment, I’d be a bit meh. But… well… the second half has a young man accused of murder recounting his crime. It’s astonishing for various reasons that I go into ecstatic detail in my Locus review—but, simply put, it’s the sort of literary ambition that gives me hope for contemporary fiction.

I know this type of storytelling isn’t for everyone. There’s not much plot, the subject matter is challenging, the morality opaque. But if you’re willing to open yourself up to something different, something disquieting and strange, put Repeat Room on your To Be Read pile.