The Survival Game, by Nicky Singer. Young Adults
Teen fiction today
seems to centre on stories with a Dystopian theme; young people battling to survive as best they
can in an alien, futuristic and brutal society:
Nicky Singer’s novel is no different – except that it reflects a world situation that is all too real for us
all: global warming and its terrible
consequences.
Mhairi Anne Bain is fourteen years old. She is walking in the North of England,
hoping to reach the Scottish border, where she will seek shelter with her
grandmother who lives on the Isle of Arran.
Mhairi has undergone unimaginable suffering to have reached this stage
of the journey: her parents had spent
seven years working in the Sudan before they were both murdered by
trigger-happy border guards; she was
lucky enough to escape. She was not pursued by the border guards – why
bother? The desert would kill her
anyway. Except that it didn’t: she has survived so far – but is infuriated to
find herself being followed by an old man and a little boy. She doesn’t need company: she moves very quickly by herself, but when
the old man falls dead at her feet and the little boy stubbornly follows her
regardless of all her clever attempts to shake him off, she accepts the
inevitable: he has become her
responsibility, whether she likes it or not.
The little boy is brown-skinned and from somewhere on the
African continent; he is also mute – but
not deaf, or so traumatised that he is an impossible burden, but it is obvious
that he has suffered terribly, as Mhairi finds when they reach Glasgow, which
is full of refugees just like him. He searches all those half-starved faces for
a familiar one, only to be heartbreakingly disappointed. And the tragedy of all those waves of people
heading north is that their own countries are no longer habitable: global warming has turned their lush tropical
lands into sand and dust. They must all
move to the colder regions or die.
Mhairi finds too that, after seven years away from her
beloved Scotland savage new laws are now in place to conserve and protect the
scarce remaining resources – and to protect the rights of the white celtic
indigenous population against the ‘predations’ and sheer numbers of desperate
migrants. Compassion has flown out the
window, especially from her grandmother, so happy to see her initially – until
she arrived with the little brown mute.
Nicky Singer has written a story that is beautiful and
terrible, a story that fills us equally with hope and despair, for no-one can
deny the frightening existence of climate change or be afraid of its consequences, portrayed
so ably in this unforgettable book.
Everyone should read this. SIX STARS.
No comments:
Post a Comment