I loved the movie when it came out — that tracking shot is seared in my memory — and I always meant to read the book but never got around to it (so thanks, Backlisted).

And what a strange, unsettling, fascinating novel. It starts with the diary entries of academic Theo Faron. With the give-no-shits attitude of someone who’s thrown in the towel, Theo tells us that the last child born 25 years ago has just died. He then fills us in on his dystopian world, one where sperm counts have dropped to zero, where there hasn’t been a new-born since 1996 (the book is set in 2021), where Britain is run by a Warden and his Council, where a private army (the Grenadiers) and a Secret Police keep order, where the elderly drown themselves in a ritual called the Quietus, where the Isle of Man has become a Darwinian prison and where the final generation, the Omegas, are utterly amoral.

Theo reluctantly gets involved with a resistance group called the Five Fishes, falling in love with one of the fishes — Julian. As a resistance group, they’re pretty hapless, sending out fliers to express their demands. But then Julian becomes pregnant (not to Theo), and suddenly, they are on the run from the Warden and his Grenadiers. 

The novel is icy cold, switching between Theo’s matter-of-fact diary entries to a third-person narrative that’s no friendlier. There’s a very Christian bleakness to it all, of a God who has forsaken humanity. As such, there’s a cruelty to it, where people die violently, James never turning the camera away. It all leads to a brilliant ending. It’s nothing like the tracking shot of the movie but an ending freighted with ambiguity that becomes less ambiguous and more disturbing the longer you think about it.

The temptation is to overlay James’s dystopia — written in 1992 — on the current moment. It’s not an easy fit; there’s little about the environment, and while sperm counts are down, it’s nothing like how it’s depicted here. But that sense of hopelessness and lack of purpose leading to apathy that allows an authoritarian regime to establish itself does resonate. 

It’s not a perfect novel. There’s a density to the prose that’s maybe, at times, a little too oppressive. But I’m glad I read it. Like the movie, it’s left its mark on my consciousness.