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The title of
Sarah Langan’s A Better World appropriately comes from one of the many
difficult conversations that take place between protagonist Linda Farmer and
her husband, son, and daughter. She’s a thoughtful parent with a difficult
past, and she reaches at the absolute limits of her understanding to
communicate with the others in her family. In her daughter Josie’s uncharacteristically clean
bedroom, Linda struggles to find out what’s going on with her child, and Josie
says, “You don’t see me.”
This
conversation ends with some ugly “Fuck yous!”
But it leads
to the truth. Linda later admits, “When you’re living a thing sometimes you’re
too close to know.”
And mother
and daughter—eventually as well as son/brother and husband/father— all get to
the truth. The truth doesn’t set them free, but it brings them closer together,
and in that position, they are able to work their way to hope.
Yes, A
Better World is a first-rate dystopian thriller. The speculative world
feels right. Rather than the jack-booted thuggery of 20th Century
fascism, we have decadent capitalism surviving far past its
viability. A world where democracy exists as a series of ragtag fiefdoms that, at their best, pale in comparison to the company towns created by individual corporate autocrats.
In fact, the
world of A Better World feels almost exactly like the world we live in
now, its satire rooted in our own excesses. The ActHollow organizing committee
that stands apart from the town and boldly runs town society as well as crucial
infrastructure would make familiar television—The Real Housewives of Plymouth
Valley. The absurdity of the town mascot is, in the best magic realist sense,
believably ironic—a genetically engineered low-carbon-footprint, no-hormone-fattening bird called the Caladrius, after the mythical Roman beast that eats
sickness and restores health to humanity.
Except think
instead of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the
story of a diseased, disappointing creature that no one can believe is an
angel. Langan’s Caladrius is a fat, dirty, and uncoordinated chicken, a little
like a blind, arthritic, and infertile transgenic pig. Langan’s world has
trillionaires while most live in poverty; our world anticipates the first
trillionaire in a decade while 5 billion people have become poorer since Langan’s
last book.
In that
book, Good Neighbors, Langan distinguished herself by not only writing riveting
speculative fiction, but by focusing on carefully nuanced families in the foreground,
getting at class bias in a society that pretends it doesn’t exist. In Langan’s
latest argument, the family dynamics make a globally urgent and necessary case.
It’s no stretch to say A Better World suggests the fate of the planet depends
on the hard work we do in our most intimate and crucial relationships. The
level of truth we hope to find in those places holds the key to saving the
world.
And if we’re
honest, we know this is the key we’re looking for in even the most casual conversations
in America 2024.
Linda Farmer
admits it’s hard to see the truth of the big picture when you are living through
it, but her story shows us why we must try. For that reason, and many more
(including the pleasure I had tearing through this book despite a very rough
chapter in my own personal history), A Better World makes a case for the
value of speculative fiction by answering the pain of the real world we live in
today with uncommon heart and soul. Sometime soon, we need to start talking
about what’s happening around us with the same kind of unbridled honesty Josie
Farmer demands from her mother. A Better World can help. At the least,
it only helps.
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| Sarah Langan reads at Village Well books, courtesy Chris L. Terry |
Reviews of Langan's previous books:
