This was an exciting and very thought-provoking book, with two separate – but intertwined strands. You could just read it as a near-future adventure of three disparate families, who have been split apart (for various reasons) seeking reunion, and some form of peace in an increasingly mad world. They are aided by a teenaged Prophet, with supernatural, spiritual powers, a young girl, Louise, and a rag-tag group of disaffected adults., and opposed by a set of adults, who could easily be described as evil, as well as others who are just downright insane. This is not a post-apocalyptic world, rather one that is charging headlong into an apocalypse. Or at least parts of it are, while in other not-so-distant parts, life carries on as ‘usual’.
But what makes this book unique – and for me fascinating – are the long author curated passages of philosophy/psychology, which try to understand and explain how the world could (and may do!) end up in this horrendous state. All over the world teenagers are committing suicide – some alone, others in groups – whole school classes. Why? You are soon asking yourself – Why Not?

“With a virus, you could inoculate. You could isolate. You could watch for physical symptoms. But this—this was something heretofore unseen in human existence. An act of collective surrender”
““They kill themselves,” says the Prophet, “because they can’t feel God’s hand. All they see is the war they must fight. And wars, in their experience, never end. The War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the so-called Culture War. Our endless human wars. And so they write this— A one one—and they surrender to the night. Because they know what happens to children who go to war.”
From the author’s point of view, there is so much negativity and hatred in the world. Politics is divided as perhaps never before. The earth is being destroyed, climate change is reaching a tipping point, corona virus, opioid epidemics, gun violence in countries that are not (official) at war, orchestrated child sexual abuse … There are some readily identifiable baddies, such as those modelled on Epstein & Maxwell, and the Sackler family, and a ‘God-King’ (I have my suspicions on that one), and a slew of well-known conspiracy theories. The author does not blame one particular party for the chaos in the USA – rather the complete failure of empathy, of compromise, of seeing other points of view. He does not name the two US political parties. He refers to them as ‘The Party of Lies’ and ‘The Party of Truth’ – and leaves it up to you to decide which is which.
…“Pundits pointed out that the dead belonged to both parties, but the faithful knew the truth. Anyone who lost a child was a traitor, no matter what allegiance they claimed. No matter how loyal they had been in the past. The death itself was the proof.”
The parties are also described as the Drinkers, and the Cooks.
“The Drinkers are suspicious too, trying to figure out the angle. A Cook nominated a Drinker. Is the Drinker not a real Drinker, or is the Cook not a real Cook? The idea of true bipartisanship never occurs to them”
There are plenty of numbers in this book – statistics and costs (what is the cost of a watch, a taser, a gun - of a life?)
“One hundred billion people have lived and died on this planet since the dawn of human history, five hundred and eighty-five million of them Americans, living or dead. One-fifth of us are Muslims. Eighteen point two percent are Chinese. Twelve million are stateless. More than one hundred million live in countries where they hold no citizenship. These numbers can be added or subtracted, divided or multiplied to create the statistics of our existence, numbers that will soon be consumed by other numbers: annual rainfall totals, desertification sprawl, sea-level rise, heat indexes, storm surges, hurricanes per year, tornadoes per month, as we realize that the story of Planet Earth is not the story of the human animal and its victories and defeats, but a story told in geological time, a story without heroes or villains, without progress. A story, simply, of what happened.”
Stalin once said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. This book gives many statistics, but it also gives you single characters who represent those statistics to focus on and care about
“that girl isn’t here now, the one we call Louise Conklin. Instead, there is a stand-in, a proxy for every African, every Jamaican, every Haitian who has ever had the nerve to draw breath in this land. She will die here anonymously on this spot, thinks Louise, and when they brag of her death, all she will be is her color.”
Young Simon finally works it out:
““It’s grief. The five stages of death, right? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but we’re all trapped in the first two stages. The whole country, or maybe the Earth. We’re in denial and we’re pissed, because something we love is dead, except, for half the country, what they’re grieving is the past they think they’ve lost, and the other half is mourning the progress they thought they’d made, but everyone feels the same way. Like someone they love is dead. … “But we can’t move on,” he says, “none of us, because you’re preying on us, you and the others, turning our grief into cash, keeping us angry, keeping us fighting, keeping us divided so you can take our children and bleed us dry.””
In this book, the world has opened Pandora’s box, and we just have to believes there is still a tiny bit of hope remaining that there will be a future, and that children will no longer feel the need to die.
I highly recommend this book to all readers and thinkers.
I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own and not influenced by either the author or publisher.

I loved Before the Fall, so when I was invited to read the latest offering by Noah Hawley, I was both intrigued and eager to get into Anthem.

Anthem is not Before the Fall.

While there were parts I enjoyed, and I guess I appreciate and respect what Hawley was trying to do with this story, I think maybe there was too much…sorry but it just wasn’t for me.

Thank you to Noah Hawley, Hodder & Stoughton, and NetGalley for the invitation to read a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a classic and frightening dystopian novel about the future; the bad news is that 90% of it is already here!

The anthem in this title is for doomed youth, referencing the Wilfrud Owen poem of that name while the emerging narrative thread is that young people are committing suicide in increasing numbers, as the state and its structures slowly fall apart, and at a time when the climate emergency is destroying the planet. However, that’s just the start.

The book follows a group of young people from disparate yet, in their own ways, quite awful backgrounds and upbringings who come together and, against the odds, survive in a world where no adults acknowledge the obvious problems, where teenage mental health issues are simply treatable with drugs, where politicians tell lies, the wealth gap grows and shared social responsibility is left in the gutter.

As the book develops, the USA burns both metaphorically and environmentally. The social media obsession with polarisation and adversarial debate breaks down the democratic consensus and violence, if not quite Civil War, is the result. The storming of the Capitol building was just the start.

There are a lot of targets in this book. They include the super rich who live above the law, a subcategory of rich paedophiles whose wealth saves them from the law, the mad American right which tries to live outside the law and the appalling state of the world which is never legislated for. It’s a book to make you angry but also to reflect on how we got to where we are.

It’s not just for the American market. You can also see the same processes at work in the UK. It’s a truism that what happens in the USA often happens here just a bit later but our current state of government and politics would strongly reinforce that view.

However, it’s not just a rant. This is a story and it rolls along as such, although the capacity of the young people to survive and find one another sometimes seems to be more of a literary device rather than a probable, or even possible, sequence of events. In the end, there is a sort of happy ending and, perhaps, a vague hope for the future but you have the feeling that that is more because readers like happy endings than anything else and then the author intervenes to underline this point. It’s a neat trick.

It is a superb book, a brilliantly controlled narrative and is completely of its time. It would be a worthy Booker prize winner yet you can’t help but suspect that some readers and critics would rather keep their heads in the sand. It’s a stunning read and highly recommended.

A searing dystopian examination of current and future America - a bit heavy-handed on the politics and the author spends a bit too much time whining about lockdowns, but overall an interesting read.

BOOK REVIEW: All that is wrong with the new American Way

The kids are not alright. That’s the central theme of Noah Hawley’s sprawling, dark and dystopian novel Anthem, an unsettlingly plausible literary fantasy. “What is this world our parents are giving us, if not a disaster?" asks a teenager known as The Prophet.
Hawley, an American television director, producer, and writer, created and wrote the series Fargo and Legion, and is working on a new series based on the Alien films. He has also written five novels. Anthem, his sixth, is a big, bold attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the US and the world – at a time when we are absolutely failing as a society to find meaning and purpose, and when reality itself cannot be agreed upon.
In the new American Way, Hawley writes, “We have home remedies we swear by, superstitions we will not renounce. We are optimists or pessimists, trusting or suspicious. We confirm our theories online. The internet, invented to ‘democratize information,’ has turned out, instead, to be a tool of self-affirmation. Whether you believe you’re suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or that 9/11 was an inside job, the World Wide Web exists to tell you you’re right. You are always right.”
The novel opens in 2009. A white judge named Margot Nadir and her second husband, a black man named Remy, are watching their 9-year-old daughter, Story, sing the national anthem at a school concert. In a moment of foreboding, the aptly named Nadirs say they are proud to “belong to the party of Lincoln”. Margot feels, “As if this moment — in which her daughter has decided to give voice to the war-torn hopes of a new nation — combined with the surprise of hearing her sing it for the first time, has created a synchronicity of deep spiritual meaning. It is not a voluntary feeling. Not an intellectual choice. The judge spends her days sitting on a dais before an American flag. She herself is an American institution — Her Honor — steeped in the power and history of symbols.”
Then Hawley fast-forwards to several years after the Covid-19 pandemic, a time, he writes, that spurred an almost-civil war, “the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.” The characters in the novel have been taken over by bigotry, isolation and disillusionment. America is besieged by a teenage suicide epidemic driven by the internet, “an act of collective surrender”, that begins in small numbers and then spikes, with crowds of teens electing to kill themselves rather than live in a hopeless world. Although there is little possibility of ending what soon becomes a global phenomenon, some youngsters choose to stand up and rage against the misery of existence.
Among them is Simon Oliver, an introspective 15-year-old recovering from the shock of his sister's suicide. It’s in the rendering of moments like Claire Oliver’s suicide-as-a-staged-performance that Hawley’s skill as a television writer comes so superbly to the fore. Their father, Ty Oliver, owns the single largest manufacturer of prescription opioids on the planet. His daughter covers her parents’ capacious marble bathroom in empty foil packets of oxycodone, creating an art installation that speaks to Ty’s culpability, leaving him to find his dead daughter slumped over on a red velvet chair, “like a still from a Kubrick film”. This macabre scene drives the narrative forward at a frantic pace.
Simon breaks out of the Float Anxiety Abatement Centre accompanied by fellow patients Louise, a resolute young woman dealing with the trauma of sexual captivity, and The Prophet, a messianic figure formerly known as Paul, who frequently editorialises on the state of the nation. “Self-determination theory,” The Prophet says, “states that human beings need three basic things in order to feel content. Number one, they need to feel competent at what they do. Number two, they need to feel authentic in their lives, and number three, they need to feel connected to others. Is there anyone here who feels they can check all three of those boxes?”
Together, they set off on a quest to confront an enigmatic, cruel and untouchable man named The Wizard, who bears no small resemblance to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Their motley band of armed adolescents grows. As they make their way across the country their stories thread with those of a large cast of characters, some of whom we encounter perhaps too briefly. But Hawley’s vivid characterisations and his descriptions of dangerous mobs of vigilantes in clown outfits are as terrifying as any of Stephen King’s most malevolent characters; all of them united by hate, they are each distinct enough to allow the reader to imagine them all too clearly.
In a passage that brings to mind the final poignant line "We really did have everything, didn't we?" spoken by Leonardo di Caprio in Don’t Look Up, a film that judges our society to be beyond saving, Hawley writes: “One day when humanity is extinct or reduced to feral tribes living in cave-side retreats, they will sing songs of everything we took for granted. Of mystical signals that flew by wind and burrowed under the ground, lighting up the darkness and cooling the air…How we flew through the troposphere and spoke to people in far-off lands, as if by sorcery. Sweet waters could be chilled and turned into solids and eaten from sticks. Popsicles, they called them…So many riches. So much power. And all we had to do was decide. Would we cleave together or cleave apart?”
Is this the twilight’s last gleaming, Hawley asks. Despite his frequent authorial intrusions into the narrative, Anthem offers no answers, no redemption.

Not one for me at this time- I found it difficult to get into and very disjointed so couldn't finish it.
I may well come back to it in the future when I have more time to read in bigger chunks as I think you need to be able to read a significant amount in one sitting to keep track of the complex plots.

I was once told by a person far kinder and with more wisdom than myself that if you can’t say something positive then don’t say anything at all, so I will say nothing about this book

Conflicted about this one. It's a mashup of a literary novel with beautifully written scenes and interesting characters, a dystopian YA adventure, and journalistic polemic. All the issues of the day are thrown in - from armed insurrectionists to climate catastrophe to opioids, with even an Epstein-type figure.

At times I felt the author was banging me over the head with a message that I didn't need to hear again. It's so of the moment that you'll either be already seeped in the issues, or not interested in reading about them. In five years it will probably feel dated. In fifty years it might be fascinating social history, if there are still books, or people to read them.

Having said that, I did enjoy the quality of the prose and was curious enough to keep reading to the end.

This is definitely the best book I’ve read in the last year. I found it funny in places and tragic and exciting and the whole way through I was thinking I hope they make a movie out of this!

I liked the way the author spoke at the beginning, middle and end of the novel- usually I don’t like that breaking the fourth wall trope but here I think it worked and was also necessary.

The main characters are appealing and the pace is blistering. Those with an interest in American politics and power will be familiar with a lot of the backdrop, but seen through the eyes of (terrifyingly smart) teenagers, it hits different.

There is definitely a lot going on in this book and some of it doesn’t necessarily make sense but it’s a very entertaining ride!

I've really enjoy Noah Hawley books before and feel that this was a bit different to the books I've read before. I enjoyed this, although would say it wasn't always an easy book to read as the story is so close to home in terms of what is happening across the world. Powerful, insightful and frightening, a fantastic book all in all.

2.5 to 3.

“The sins of the father must be made right by the son”

“The world is a lie”.

A few years before the days of judgement, Judge Margot Burr-Nadir watches her nine year old daughter Story (?? She will be important later on) sing the Anthem while baby son Hadrian (good name for an emperor or if you’re building a wall, otherwise pretentious maybe that’s the point!) is snuggled in his carrier. I guess what unfolds is an Anthem to/for America. A few years later, a suicide teen phenomenon sweeps the nation and the world, a symbol of the “sickness” of our universe. I’m not even going to try to explain the plot of this one or I’ll tie myself in knots much like the author does to me. In simple terms it’s a battle of good over evil which obviously depends on your definition since much of the novel is political. A youthful Jesus like figure “The Prophet“ is at the forefront of a charge to freedom from drugs that numb, poverty, intolerance, politics and so on (such as character ‘God’s Truth’ a clue, think orange) while the forces of evil are represented by a pharma billionaire rich on the opioid addiction and an Epstein type figure, rich has Croesus known as The Wizard.

It’s a Four Horsemen, apocalyptic, dystopian tale with the background accompaniment of Wagner‘s Ride of the Valkyries and about as far from an easy read as it’s possible to get. It’s gloomy, full of foreboding and an utterly damning commentary especially on America and which at times descends into an incoherent ramble. Guns, politics, climate change, you name it, it’s here. It’s very complex, too complex in my opinion, deeply disturbing and very, very depressing partly because much of what the author points out is real and here right now.

However, as we are still fighting our own battle against Covid I’m not sure I needed the stress of this book too! It’s a very difficult book to read, I nearly jack in the effort on several occasions but I am a tenacious and obstinate Brit so I keep going. At times, it’s so American I haven’t a clue what the author is on about and yet and yet it does make some valid points in amongst the mayhem and my head scratching. There are far too many characters which makes you even dizzier. The turmoil, madness and chaos builds and you could say it most certainly hits the fan as an orange glow is visible on the horizon.

Do I like it? No, because of the way it’s written as it takes so much effort to stick with it. My advice don’t read it if you want to stay away from anything political or if you’re feeling a bit down but do if you’re curious. Be sure to read other reviews as many rate it much higher than myself.

My final words – boo phooey, it’s all just too much for me!

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Hodder and Stoughton for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

Noah Hawley is angry and a little bit scared of the future, especially on behalf of his children. Those familiar with his previous book Before the Fall could not fail to miss the takedown of the twentyfour hour news cycle and the power and influence of Fox News. In Anthem he goes further, exploring the fear and division that has taken over America and the impact that is having on the young and on the world. And just in case readers are not sure about his views, Anthem contains a couple of fourth-wall breaking authorial comments where he tries to justify the extreme but totally possible future that he has imagined.
The ridiculous and painful world of Anthem is one in which there is an unstoppable, global epidemic of teenage suicide for which no one has an answer or a cure. One of the first “victims” of this movement is Claire Oliver, daughter of an obscenely wealthy family who made their fortune from selling opioids. Claire’s younger brother Simon, himself on a cocktail of anxiety and anti-depressant drugs, has been sent to a retreat with other teens in the hope that they can be “cured” or at least protected. There he meets Paul, who calls himself “the prophet” and together with another inmate Simon goes on a quest across the country to rescue a young woman from the clutches of another obscenely wealthy and powerful man known as “the Wizard”. At the same time, Judge Margot Nadir is being put forward for a place on the US Supreme Court by a President of the opposite political stripe as a way of showing bipartisanship. Judge Nadir’s daughter is missing but she presses on with the confirmation hearings as in the background the shadowy forces that supported her to his position wait patiently.
There is plenty more going on in Anthem, and a number of other archetype characters including the Troll and the Witch, giving the whole thing a fairytale feel. And as climate change-fuelled fires rage, an uprising of gun-wielding groups seeking freedom (but with very little else in common as it turns out) happens and the country descends into anarchy.
While Hawley is able to build a coincidence filled but propulsive plot around the quest of Simon and his friends, it is all in service of polemic about the evils of the modern world, usually in the mouth of the Prophet, Paul. And where there is no opportunity for his characters to observe the irony of their situation, Hawley’s authorial voice is there to explain:
And herein lies one of the issues with Anthem. While Hawley imagines the same issues globally he is really only tackling America. When he makes observations about gun ownership and the narrative of the country being driven by guns he is talking about America. When he talks about the two different tribes of political thought (which he calls “cooks” and “drinkers”), he is talking mainly about American politics. And while many of these issues and ideas are prevalent in other, particularly Western countries, they are not the same and play out differently and it is unlikely that it would result in an armed insurrection of any type. Which is not to say that Anthem is uninteresting but many of its killer points possibly do not have the universal application that Hawley would like to think they have.
In the end, Hawley’s fear has led him to present a fairly bleak future, in which lonely teenagers commit suicide and the world is burning. Not to downplay the very real issues that he is raising but besides trying to “stick it to the man” (in this case, one very particular man), there is not much beyond the polemic and the adventure that it hangs off. And while it is fun to follow a ragtag group of teenagers battle the odds on what seems like an impossible quest, this necessary focus leaves the question of the millions of other teenagers around the world, many experiencing a very different social milieu (better and worse) unresolved.
So that in the end Anthem feels like a very American-centric cry for help. There is irony here too - given that many of the ills considered in Anthem were developed and are now widely exported by America. So that maybe those of us in other countries could see it less as reality as we live it but a cautionary tale of what happens if we keep looking to America as a some sort of light on the hill. Hawley would not be the first to observe that were there any light at all, it went out a long time ago.