Kallocain
Karin Boye
This 1940 Swedish novel was written
midway between Huxley’s and Orwell’s
works, and mixes the ‘drug dystopia’ of
the former with the suppression of
political rebellion that has become
synonymous with Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Boye’s world state uses “police eyes and
ears” to foster paranoia and crush the
will of its citizens. A s with many of the
novels featured here, it depicts its
totalitarian state through a first-person
account created by one of its members:
Leo Kall, the increasingly regretful
inventor of the titular truth serum that
reveals the recipients’ innermost
thoughts and feelings.
Inspired by Boye’s time in Germany
during the emergence of Nazism, the
book explores fears that an individual
could be rendered merely a
“happy, healthy cell in the
state organism”.The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s 1985 novel is set in the North
American state of Gilead, ruled by
a theocratic dictatorship and facing
declining birth rates, in which women
are both prized for their reproductive
capabilities and denied political
rights. Its protagonist, ‘Offred’,
is designated a ‘handmaid’ –
a woman whose function is to
produce children for the ruling
class. Anything disrupting this
order, from homosexuality to
infertility, is brutally policed.
At wood explicitly drew on
history in conceiving the
state of Gilead, with
nods to the ban
on birth control
in Romania in
the 1960s and
the treatment
of African
people in
the Atlantic
slave tradeFahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
While Karin Boye drew on the rise of
the Nazis for her novel, Ray Bradbury
focused in one specific element for his
1953 work: the burning of ‘subversive’
books in 1930s Germany. That – along
with similar acts in Stalinist Russia,
and US senator Joseph McCarthy’s
1953 list of work s by ‘pro-Communist’
authors – inspired Fahrenheit 451, its
title an allusion to the temperature at
which paper burns.
Featuring a society on the brink of
war and ‘firemen’ charged with
destroying banned material, the
parallels are striking. Bradbury
later argued that he aimed to
highlight not censorship but the
sidelining of literature by mass
media consumption and the
efforts of special-interest
groups to control publish-
ing – making individuals
as culpable as the state.GE
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Oskar Werner and Julie
Christie in a 1966 film
version of Fahrenheit 451Elisabeth Moss
(right) stars as
Offred in the US
TV adaptation of
The Handmaid’s Tale- the character Offred is
renamed to reflect her status
as a possession of her master.
Reproductive rights are still
a contentious issue in the US
today – and perhaps that’s one
of the reasons the book remains
popular. Atwood’s follow-up
novel, The Testaments, was
published in early September;
a TV series based on the original
novel is in its third season.