Robert Lukens

And, you know, fortuitous timing for the book, but perhaps not for the world, that this book comes out at a time when there is so much talk about the wall and various walls.

But when this novel begins, it opens with this line that in so many ways is a summation of the novel, it's cold on the wall.

And this is a line that sums up so much of this novel because...

Initially, we're put into this place where we don't quite know where we are in time or geography, or even in reality, we don't know how far away the world of the wall is from ours, but we know it's cold on the wall.

And we come to learn this wall is 10,000 kilometers long and three meters wide and 50 meters tall, and it surrounds the island of Great Britain.

And all we know is that here on our side of the wall are the defenders and out there in this world of sea are the others.

And all the others are going to try and do is breach that wall and all the defenders have to do is stop them.

Yeah, and it has, well, it has echoes of so many things.

And initially we see this world through the eyes of Joseph Kavanagh, Joseph K. And as we touched upon, John Lanchester is a well-known writer and editor and literary critic and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books.

So this is a chap that knows his books.

And by naming this lead character, Joseph K, this big brass bell is rung.

We're immediately taken to Kafka's The Trial.

And in so many ways, especially the first third of this novel, there are so many echoes of The Trial.

It's a world that's ambiguous and irrational and endlessly repeating itself.

Every day, these defenders wake up, put on their coat, and they go and sit on the wall with their rifles and they stare out into the distance and they are just waiting for this faceless, menacing other to come and attack.

And in so many ways, it's...

uh echoes that idea of the trial of this we don't quite understand the motivations of the people around us we don't quite know how we got in this situation or what we're doing but we know this world keeps repeating day after day this continues in that first third of the novel we are in that in the same way that kafka put us in that world and that's what's so challenging about that novel because we are in this labyrinthine world of

just repeating things over and over and this sense of paranoia and menace from the outside.

And so we live on this wall for the first third of this novel.

And it's at that point that the novel takes something of a left-hand turn and becomes dominated by a relationship with another defender on this wall, a woman named Heifer.