Anthem

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!

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.

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.

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.

Anthem by Noah Hawley is a genuinely disturbing vision of a dystopian future that is a slightly blurred or shifted version of the reality we are facing today, and is one of the most memorable books I have read in a very long time. At times the author speaks directly to the reader, describing his fears for the world his children will inherit, but that fear is also woven into the story he is telling, much of which is told from the point of view of teenagers. The book consists of several different narratives and perspectives which at first seem completely separate but which are cleverly intertwined by the end of the book. The author's skill and history in television makes him a master of these intricate plotlines and I was completely gripped by his tale. He tackles many of the issues making global headlines , from climate change to the growing opioid epidemic, and incorporates characters that are thinly disguised versions of their real life counterparts.
One of the most gripping and memorable books I have read in a very long time.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

This was some story. At first I didn't think I would be able to finish it but I kept going and eventually began to understand. It was certainly and experience not easily forgotten and a hope that the World does not come to this.

I have been a huge fan of Noah Hawley since reading before the fall, and Anthem has kept him in my good graces! A searing look at America today, this is also a rollicking page turner - literary suspense at its finest.

This book is funny, tragic, superbly written and I would absolutely recommend this book to my audience

Anthem seems to have polarised opinion, which is probably quite apt considering the subject matter of this colossal novel.

A book that reflects the state of the world. Divided. Damaged. Violent.

Young people are taking their own lives in the thousands.

How do we make sense of that?

A small group of these young people are on a mission to change the world. To create a new way of being after the chaos and destruction that is their inheritance.

A vast range of characters reflecting each side of the political divide. A billionaire paedophile (sound familiar?) Anarchy and violence.

There is also quite a strange supernatural element that didn't quite sit right for me.

And this book is long. It's detailed. It's depressing.

But it's also quite brilliant. Had it been written 30 years ago even, it would have sounded far fetched and like the ramblings of a deluded soul.

Now however it is a grisly testament to the world as we know it.

If you're looking for a light-hearted bit of escapism, Anthem is not for you. But if you want something meaty to get your teeth into and something that will make you think and reflect, then Anthem will tick those boxes.