Book review: A Bloody Arrogant Power, by Malcolm J. Wardlaw
The fictional setting is one where the capitalist/ consumerist societies we currently inhabit have been swept away in an economic collapse that has dropped culture to the survival level, where it hasn’t bounced. Donald Aldingford is the tool the author uses to open up this dystopian world and he does start out as someone it’s difficult to find a place in your heart for, a stuffed shirt with bought and paid for loyalty to the undeserving family which employs him. He must be softened, humanised over the course of the story, or die. The reader senses this, but which will it be?
We soon discover that these decadent ruling families, for there are several, have the power of life and death over their employees and can even cull the population their lands sustain when it flourishes beyond a formulaically calculated quota. Who runs the calculation about how many these feudal estates can feed — and the ‘surplus’ head of population they cannot? That would be a helpful retainer like Donald, of course. As the bean counter is brought into the secret, he can tell himself he’s only solving a maths puzzle but by obliging the process, when he knows it is about people’s deaths, he must also share in the guilt. That’s a neat trick by his boss because it should guarantee his loyalty to a system which can’t shield him from the vengeance of victims if it falls.
The book cleverly trips up any reader who falls into the trap of predicting which way it’s going, particularly when the protagonist becomes friends with a sort of trade union activist woman who works for the success of an academic leftist professor figure. I thought the path it was taking would be a thinly veiled recommendation that Marxism is the panacea for all of society’s ills, but that guess was wrong as the author preferred to show what’s wrong with every system. The thing that really fails seems to be promoting economic theory ahead of human life, i.e. economics gets them into the mess and then economics creates steady-state cruelty, which is an error common to both control systems. To break the cycle of hardship, something new needs to flush this pond. Is it revolution or does that only replace one kind of endemic misery with another?
Although dystopia is by its nature hardly an uplifting subject, there were quite a few things I liked about this story. It is quite steampunk and has a Victorian air to it, especially with the farming families who have gained airs and turned into aristocratic despots, the rag-tag soldiery who serve their gangland interests, the concept of a great drain around London where people meet their end hounded by vultures, the legal system that serves only the one percent but in which people still believe, the Parliament of the plutocrats who bitch amongst themselves like senators of Rome, but also the whole population missing the obvious — that if they put all the massive effort they are making to keep a broken system running into instead building better farming or fishing equipment, then the land could sustain a much larger population and there’d be no reason to remove anyone. This has an Orwellian overtone because in 1984 there were continual fabricated wars to keep the population down and improve national solidarity. Commonly, the problem is not ‘the problem’ but is really what great crime is being committed in response to the problem.
I’ve read two of the books in this series so far and this is the best of them. In the news only yesterday appeared a couple of economic modellers who had concluded that our society will collapse in the next 20 to 40 years. Perhaps this is what that slump will look like? If so, hording tinned peaches and lavatory rolls will be of little help. You can read it here first.
