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Fallen Land
From the critically acclaimed author of Absolution, a literary page-turner set in the American heartland.
Poplar Farm has been in Louise’s family for generations, inherited by her sharecropping forbearer from a white landowner after a lynching. Now the farm has been carved up, the trees torn down—a mini-massacre replicating the history of many farms before it, and the destruction of lives and societies taking place all across America.
Architect of this destruction is Paul Krovik, a property developer soon driven insane by the failure of his ambition. Left behind is a half-finished "luxury suburb” of neo-Victorian homes on the outskirts of a sprawling midwestern city. To Paul it is a collapsed dream, but to Julia and Nathaniel, arriving from their small Boston apartment, it is a new start, promising a bucolic future. With their son, Copley, they buy Paul’s signature home in a foreclosure sale and move in to their brave new world. Yet violence lies just beneath the surface of this land, and simmers deep within Nathaniel. The remaining trees bear witness, Louise lives on in her beleaguered farmhouse, and as reality shifts, and the edges of what is right and wrong blur and then vanish, Copley becomes convinced that someone is living in the house with them.
Poplar Farm has been in Louise’s family for generations, inherited by her sharecropping forbearer from a white landowner after a lynching. Now the farm has been carved up, the trees torn down—a mini-massacre replicating the history of many farms before it, and the destruction of lives and societies taking place all across America.
Architect of this destruction is Paul Krovik, a property developer soon driven insane by the failure of his ambition. Left behind is a half-finished "luxury suburb” of neo-Victorian homes on the outskirts of a sprawling midwestern city. To Paul it is a collapsed dream, but to Julia and Nathaniel, arriving from their small Boston apartment, it is a new start, promising a bucolic future. With their son, Copley, they buy Paul’s signature home in a foreclosure sale and move in to their brave new world. Yet violence lies just beneath the surface of this land, and simmers deep within Nathaniel. The remaining trees bear witness, Louise lives on in her beleaguered farmhouse, and as reality shifts, and the edges of what is right and wrong blur and then vanish, Copley becomes convinced that someone is living in the house with them.
406 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
21 people are currently reading
987 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Flanery
20 books78 followersPatrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
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September 3, 2013
"Perhaps we are merely a future civilization's pre-history, terrible apes who soak the land with their own blood."
FALLEN LAND is a haunting American story about the ghosts of history, dating back to the race riots of 1919, which were collectively coined the "Red Summer." This story takes place in the present, in an unnamed city in the American Heartland, which I imagine as the author's hometown of Omaha, one of the twenty-five cities that the riots took place.
The story of land ownership and dispossession reaches across generations and families. A contemporary family, the Noailles,' buys a foreclosed house on farmland that had been recently carved up by owner and builder Paul Krovik. Krovik's houses were poorly built in an upper-middle-class subdivision somewhere in the heartland, where the weather is extreme and biblical in its extremity. After he went belly up, his wife left with his young son and moved to Florida. He is determined to turn his bad luck around, so he burrows in a hidden basement of the house.
The family who buys Krovik's house hails from Boston. Nathanial Noailles, who works as an executive in the menacingly NSA-like security company called EKK, his wife, Julia, a scientist, and their 9 year-old quirky, eccentric, and highly sensitive and intelligent son, Copley, move here to start a new life.
Retired schoolteacher, Louise Washington, owned the land that Krovik bought and violated. Her ancestor was a black sharecropper that was lynched during the race riots. She was forced to sell her farmland to Krovik, and now the government has condemned her house in order to make a turn lane. Louise has found a way to secretly remain in her condemned house, at least while it is still standing. The Poplar Farm history or back story is fascinating, and the sinkhole where Louise's forebear still hangs in a tree becomes a motif in Flanery's story.
In the opening pages, we learn of the history of the farmland. It then segues to a chapter of Louise reluctantly visiting Krovik in prison. How this all came about is the story at hand, and oh what a story it is. If Stephen King had Kafka and John Cheever's DNA, he might have written this story, or something like it. Flanery is brilliant at capturing a vanishing suburbia and the paranoia of growing surveillance. It's both creepy and literary, climbing to an ineluctable horror story of human nature. The author is also nuanced with the themes of redemption, and creates characters that not only inhabit the Poplar farm, but also burrow right inside your marrow. Read it and weep; just try to sleep!
"We have to assume that everything we do is always under scrutiny."
FALLEN LAND is a haunting American story about the ghosts of history, dating back to the race riots of 1919, which were collectively coined the "Red Summer." This story takes place in the present, in an unnamed city in the American Heartland, which I imagine as the author's hometown of Omaha, one of the twenty-five cities that the riots took place.
The story of land ownership and dispossession reaches across generations and families. A contemporary family, the Noailles,' buys a foreclosed house on farmland that had been recently carved up by owner and builder Paul Krovik. Krovik's houses were poorly built in an upper-middle-class subdivision somewhere in the heartland, where the weather is extreme and biblical in its extremity. After he went belly up, his wife left with his young son and moved to Florida. He is determined to turn his bad luck around, so he burrows in a hidden basement of the house.
The family who buys Krovik's house hails from Boston. Nathanial Noailles, who works as an executive in the menacingly NSA-like security company called EKK, his wife, Julia, a scientist, and their 9 year-old quirky, eccentric, and highly sensitive and intelligent son, Copley, move here to start a new life.
Retired schoolteacher, Louise Washington, owned the land that Krovik bought and violated. Her ancestor was a black sharecropper that was lynched during the race riots. She was forced to sell her farmland to Krovik, and now the government has condemned her house in order to make a turn lane. Louise has found a way to secretly remain in her condemned house, at least while it is still standing. The Poplar Farm history or back story is fascinating, and the sinkhole where Louise's forebear still hangs in a tree becomes a motif in Flanery's story.
In the opening pages, we learn of the history of the farmland. It then segues to a chapter of Louise reluctantly visiting Krovik in prison. How this all came about is the story at hand, and oh what a story it is. If Stephen King had Kafka and John Cheever's DNA, he might have written this story, or something like it. Flanery is brilliant at capturing a vanishing suburbia and the paranoia of growing surveillance. It's both creepy and literary, climbing to an ineluctable horror story of human nature. The author is also nuanced with the themes of redemption, and creates characters that not only inhabit the Poplar farm, but also burrow right inside your marrow. Read it and weep; just try to sleep!
"We have to assume that everything we do is always under scrutiny."
June 7, 2013
It is hard not to read Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Lands as a cautionary tale, a parable of how far we’ve fallen and how quickly we’ve “advanced” to a future of hyper-security and lack of individuality.
Nathaniel, his wife Julia and their sensitive and troubled son Copley swap their city life in Boston for a planned community in Delores Woods, an unnamed southern town. They were able to purchase the house due to a foreclosure; the planner of the community, Paul Krovik, abandoned the community after his neighbors sued him for shoddy work and now he has lost everything – perhaps even his sanity. One other key character, Louise, a black woman whose claim to the land stems from her sharecropping great-grandparents, is now disposed and lives on the land in hiding, refusing to abandon it.
That is the plot in a nutshell – the interactions of these five characters who, each is his or her own way, is an “outsider.” When Copley claims to hear a “giant man” prowling around in their basement – the place where Paul Krovik has taken up residence – the wheels begin their relentless spin out of control.
It is not necessarily the plot, but the theme, that propels this novel. Nathaniel works for a huge corporation that is hell-bent on taking away freedoms in the name of ultimate profits: His boss tells him, “We need responsible officers, people who understand that the way their live their personal lives, at home, is a reflection on the work they do in the corporation, and out in the world.’
So much of the unfolding of this novel strikes close to home: the demonization and removal of perceived immigrants, the harsh punishment for anyone who breaks the rules or is “different”, the rules-oriented schools that don’t give children the freedom to step out of the lines, the paranoia about security, and the surreptitious monitoring of personal information.
Yet the beauty of Fallen Lands is it tackles not just the demons outside of us, but the demons that possess us. Paul Krovik – “the man in the basement” – may be a part of each of us, the part that dwells in our deepest recesses. Each of us, the author suggests, may be the instrument of our own destruction.
The land, of course, is another major component. Paul reflects, “He needs a job, he needs money, but he needs a house, his house, he needs to regain it first, but first he needs a job, he has to have the house in his possession to prove his ability to build other houses, he needs money to reacquire the house, needs the house to acquire money, needs the money and the house to fight for the return of his family.” It’s a conundrum that is also indicative of our society today.
Flanery writes, “Perhaps we are merely a future civilization’s prehistory, terrible apes who soak the land with our own blood”. This is a dark tale, filled with moments of insight and supreme tension, that ultimately tackles the complications of pursuing the American Dream and the warping and distortion of that dream. Coupled with his first wonderful book, Absolution, Patrick Flanery has become one of my favorite contemporary writers.
Nathaniel, his wife Julia and their sensitive and troubled son Copley swap their city life in Boston for a planned community in Delores Woods, an unnamed southern town. They were able to purchase the house due to a foreclosure; the planner of the community, Paul Krovik, abandoned the community after his neighbors sued him for shoddy work and now he has lost everything – perhaps even his sanity. One other key character, Louise, a black woman whose claim to the land stems from her sharecropping great-grandparents, is now disposed and lives on the land in hiding, refusing to abandon it.
That is the plot in a nutshell – the interactions of these five characters who, each is his or her own way, is an “outsider.” When Copley claims to hear a “giant man” prowling around in their basement – the place where Paul Krovik has taken up residence – the wheels begin their relentless spin out of control.
It is not necessarily the plot, but the theme, that propels this novel. Nathaniel works for a huge corporation that is hell-bent on taking away freedoms in the name of ultimate profits: His boss tells him, “We need responsible officers, people who understand that the way their live their personal lives, at home, is a reflection on the work they do in the corporation, and out in the world.’
So much of the unfolding of this novel strikes close to home: the demonization and removal of perceived immigrants, the harsh punishment for anyone who breaks the rules or is “different”, the rules-oriented schools that don’t give children the freedom to step out of the lines, the paranoia about security, and the surreptitious monitoring of personal information.
Yet the beauty of Fallen Lands is it tackles not just the demons outside of us, but the demons that possess us. Paul Krovik – “the man in the basement” – may be a part of each of us, the part that dwells in our deepest recesses. Each of us, the author suggests, may be the instrument of our own destruction.
The land, of course, is another major component. Paul reflects, “He needs a job, he needs money, but he needs a house, his house, he needs to regain it first, but first he needs a job, he has to have the house in his possession to prove his ability to build other houses, he needs money to reacquire the house, needs the house to acquire money, needs the money and the house to fight for the return of his family.” It’s a conundrum that is also indicative of our society today.
Flanery writes, “Perhaps we are merely a future civilization’s prehistory, terrible apes who soak the land with our own blood”. This is a dark tale, filled with moments of insight and supreme tension, that ultimately tackles the complications of pursuing the American Dream and the warping and distortion of that dream. Coupled with his first wonderful book, Absolution, Patrick Flanery has become one of my favorite contemporary writers.
August 24, 2013
This was a 4.5 star read for me.
There is nothing more wonderful than reading a book that grabs you, holds you, and then has you telling everyone – read this book! Fallen Land is a searing morally complex novel about the bittersweet legacy of families, loss, shattered dreams, and smoldering violence in a most contemplative suspenseful manner.
Louise Washington has lost too much over the past years – her husband, and most of the land (Poplar Farms) held by her family for generations. All she has left is her family home on a small plot and memories of her family’s legacy – including a sacred spot marking a long-forgotten lynching, and she refuses to lose it to eminent domain.
Paul Krovik saw an opportunity when Poplar Farms went up for sale to realize his dream for being a property developer. His dreams are shattered when shoddy construction leaves him penniless, houseless, and his wife and children has left with no forwarding address. But he does have the bunker secretly constructed under his mansion house on the hill – where he will execute his plan for getting his family back.
Julie and Nathaniel Noailles and their young son Copley, are leaving their beloved Boston for the American dream of better opportunities moving into the foreclosed Krovik mansion. There is an eerie feeling that something is not right with the house. Neither parent believes Copley when he says there is a man living in their house. Nathaniel is tagged as a rising star in his company and he is afraid that his dreams will be shattered if he and his family do not fit into the corporate credo – where each corporate reward comes with increasing restrictions on freedom and privacy.
In this beautifully construed yet haunting storyline it is the land that will put each of the well-developed characters at the crossroads with the restrained menace smoldering within each of them as volatile truths whispers become louder exploding in dangerous actions. Each character will have their say throughout this book – allowing the reader to know more than the other character effectively building the tension and suspense that had me quickly turning the pages.
While I usually do not like to compare one writers style to another but I did have thoughts of Margaret Atwood when reading about the EKK corporation and their philosophy and the blurring of government/corporations being the holder of our security by stripping away privacy and their thoughts on prison rehabilitation as the answer for more corporate profit was downright scary.
This novel is well paced and while everything points to an underlying time bomb – it was still a jolt and an unexpected twist had me chuckling on how oblivious we can become when we become solitary to our own ambitions.
There is nothing more wonderful than reading a book that grabs you, holds you, and then has you telling everyone – read this book! Fallen Land is a searing morally complex novel about the bittersweet legacy of families, loss, shattered dreams, and smoldering violence in a most contemplative suspenseful manner.
Louise Washington has lost too much over the past years – her husband, and most of the land (Poplar Farms) held by her family for generations. All she has left is her family home on a small plot and memories of her family’s legacy – including a sacred spot marking a long-forgotten lynching, and she refuses to lose it to eminent domain.
Paul Krovik saw an opportunity when Poplar Farms went up for sale to realize his dream for being a property developer. His dreams are shattered when shoddy construction leaves him penniless, houseless, and his wife and children has left with no forwarding address. But he does have the bunker secretly constructed under his mansion house on the hill – where he will execute his plan for getting his family back.
Julie and Nathaniel Noailles and their young son Copley, are leaving their beloved Boston for the American dream of better opportunities moving into the foreclosed Krovik mansion. There is an eerie feeling that something is not right with the house. Neither parent believes Copley when he says there is a man living in their house. Nathaniel is tagged as a rising star in his company and he is afraid that his dreams will be shattered if he and his family do not fit into the corporate credo – where each corporate reward comes with increasing restrictions on freedom and privacy.
In this beautifully construed yet haunting storyline it is the land that will put each of the well-developed characters at the crossroads with the restrained menace smoldering within each of them as volatile truths whispers become louder exploding in dangerous actions. Each character will have their say throughout this book – allowing the reader to know more than the other character effectively building the tension and suspense that had me quickly turning the pages.
While I usually do not like to compare one writers style to another but I did have thoughts of Margaret Atwood when reading about the EKK corporation and their philosophy and the blurring of government/corporations being the holder of our security by stripping away privacy and their thoughts on prison rehabilitation as the answer for more corporate profit was downright scary.
This novel is well paced and while everything points to an underlying time bomb – it was still a jolt and an unexpected twist had me chuckling on how oblivious we can become when we become solitary to our own ambitions.
Read
July 12, 2013This was so promising and wound up being such a mess, I'm not sure what to say, especially since I thought Absolution, his first novel, was very very strong. As a dystopian piece of fiction about the rise of the surveillance security state and the infiltration of the penal system on education, there's some real brilliance here. But at 400+ pages, many sloggy passages, a Magical Negro and a precocious child, not one but two adults who suffered abusive childhoods.........it's simply too much.
When it's good it's good but when it's bad, it's a real stinker. Very disappointing.
When it's good it's good but when it's bad, it's a real stinker. Very disappointing.
December 13, 2013
Kept going back and forth - I loved it, I hated it, I loved it. A book that definitely leaves you spinning at some moments, cold at others.
The first dislocation that I felt on opening the novel and finding the characters implausible was actually my own "fault" and a tribute to Flanery's skill. When I know I want to read a book (and Absolution got to my heart sufficiently to ensure that anything Flanery writes for the next few years will be an automatic read), I don't read any blurbs or reviews. I might glance at my GR friends' star ratings, but I won't go deeper. So I didn't know that this book was a pastiche of thriller and dystopian near future sci fi until I was about 100 pages in. I thought I was reading overdone literary fiction, until - light bulb - I realize it's not - it's dark dark satire and allegory - the ultimate chilling send up of our corporatist "security" driven culture. A backwards 1984 for our times - Big Brother is watching you, but he can't protect you from the demons that are closest to home.
The black parody is done very well - a tad over the top - but that is what dystopia is. More subdued treatment of this subject would just be reality.
And there are passages of sheer heart-thumping terror where Flanery just sweeps you along in a mad dance and you don't ever want to put the book down, even as you dread what comes next.
But there was also some huh? pacing and some plot lacunae too glaring to sustain my delightfully suspended disbelief until the very end. I don't want to write any spoilers - but there are parts of this where the characters are behaving JUST like that girl in the horror movie who obliviously wanders into the woods alone. And to give Flanery his due maybe that is exactly the genre that he is sending up in his bleak humor (again, no spoilers - but if dreadful mysterious phenomena were happening all around you every night, would you sleep with ear plugs?). But the wonderfully orchestrated waltz of horror and degradation (this book is one long love poem to The Shining) doesn't really know how to end. It's rushed, and then it's prolonged. It's utterly engrossing, and then preposterous. Unputdownable and then kind of draggy.
I think I will probably go back and raise my rating to four. It's flawed, but with many flashes of brilliance. The book got under my skin sufficiently that I started arming my alarm system before bed for the first time since moving in. It's just not the virtuoso performance that Absolution was - Flanery set himself a very high bar. But he is still firmly on my automatic "to read" list, for whatever wrenchingly devastating take on modernity comes next.
The first dislocation that I felt on opening the novel and finding the characters implausible was actually my own "fault" and a tribute to Flanery's skill. When I know I want to read a book (and Absolution got to my heart sufficiently to ensure that anything Flanery writes for the next few years will be an automatic read), I don't read any blurbs or reviews. I might glance at my GR friends' star ratings, but I won't go deeper. So I didn't know that this book was a pastiche of thriller and dystopian near future sci fi until I was about 100 pages in. I thought I was reading overdone literary fiction, until - light bulb - I realize it's not - it's dark dark satire and allegory - the ultimate chilling send up of our corporatist "security" driven culture. A backwards 1984 for our times - Big Brother is watching you, but he can't protect you from the demons that are closest to home.
The black parody is done very well - a tad over the top - but that is what dystopia is. More subdued treatment of this subject would just be reality.
And there are passages of sheer heart-thumping terror where Flanery just sweeps you along in a mad dance and you don't ever want to put the book down, even as you dread what comes next.
But there was also some huh? pacing and some plot lacunae too glaring to sustain my delightfully suspended disbelief until the very end. I don't want to write any spoilers - but there are parts of this where the characters are behaving JUST like that girl in the horror movie who obliviously wanders into the woods alone. And to give Flanery his due maybe that is exactly the genre that he is sending up in his bleak humor (again, no spoilers - but if dreadful mysterious phenomena were happening all around you every night, would you sleep with ear plugs?). But the wonderfully orchestrated waltz of horror and degradation (this book is one long love poem to The Shining) doesn't really know how to end. It's rushed, and then it's prolonged. It's utterly engrossing, and then preposterous. Unputdownable and then kind of draggy.
I think I will probably go back and raise my rating to four. It's flawed, but with many flashes of brilliance. The book got under my skin sufficiently that I started arming my alarm system before bed for the first time since moving in. It's just not the virtuoso performance that Absolution was - Flanery set himself a very high bar. But he is still firmly on my automatic "to read" list, for whatever wrenchingly devastating take on modernity comes next.
November 4, 2014
It is alleged that when Samuel Goldwyn was asked about the message he was trying to convey in his movie, can’t remember which movie, he said "If I wanted to send a message, I'd use Western Union". Someone should’ve sent the author that message, maybe even using Western Union. I found this book too clunky. It seems to be a selection of cardboard cutout situations inhabited by cardboard cutout characters. It was about as subtle as being bashed on the head continually with a snow shovel. I know the comparisons between novels can be invidious, but if we would compare this one, as a dystopian novel, with Never Let Me Go, I think you can see the subtle horror conveyed in the latter is much more effective, as opposed to the B-movie horror laid out in excessive detail in the Fallen Land. There is lots of room for the reader’s imagination to work productively in the former novel, but in the Fallen Land author trusts neither his readers nor himself, and so ladles on the detail after detail after detail until I wanted to scream, “Enough already, I get it!" As a reader, I continually felt crowded out, to say nothing of being bullied. It read to me like a bad movie script, with the all seeing all controlling corporation a poor imitation of a Philip K Dick novel or any of the other films or novels using the same trope. I found none of the characters, except maybe Copley, the young boy, of more than passing interest. The father, I thought was particularly badly developed and became more and more unreal as the book progressed. Trying to use the African-American neighbour as some kind of point of sanity in an otherwise insane world also didn’t work all that well and, again, it has been done before and better. For example, Disley, in The Sound And Fury. Finally, although there’s a great deal more to be said, it was all too bloody predictable. Also, for me, there was no rhythm in the prose. It was if a spavined mule was trying to do the tango to the music of Iron Maiden.
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January 20, 2014DE ONBEHAAGLIJKE GROND ONDER ONZE VOETEN
Een ideale wereld bestaat niet, maar wordt op vele fronten en zonder terughoudendheid nagestreefd. In Gevallen land beschrijft Patrick Flanery hoe een maakbare samenleving uit de hand kan lopen en ten onder gaat aan een overdosis veiligheid en controle.
Louise Washington heeft van haar voorouders een flink stuk land en de daarbij behorende boerderij geërfd. Alles uit de nalatenschap van een blanke landeigenaar die in koloniale tijden de zwarte pachters – voormalige slaven – zijn volledige bezit heeft toevertrouwd. Als haar man overlijdt wordt ze gedwongen het landgoed te verkopen aan een projectontwikkelaar die op die plek de uitdijende stad met een protserige buitenwijk wil opsieren.
Dat dit project tot mislukken gedoemd is, wordt door Flanery benauwend beschreven door de maniakale gedrevenheid van deze ondernemer, Paul Krovik, samen te laten vallen met zijn bouwkundige incompetentie. De paradijselijke woonwijk met grote nepklassieke verandavilla's en een gecontroleerde sociale samenhang blijkt niet aan te slaan en het hele plan is ver voor de oplevering al failliet verklaard. Tot overmaat van ramp verliest Krovik zijn eigen modelwoning en wordt hij door vrouw en kinderen verlaten.
Geheime bunker
Langzaam weet de schrijver ons mee te sleuren in zijn geconstrueerde aanloop naar de hedendaagse realiteit. De oude Louise heeft zich illegaal verschanst in haar onteigende boerderij en de afgeserveerde Paul Krovik leeft onzichtbaar in de geheime atoombunker onder zijn verlaten gezinswoning. Als dit huis wordt verkocht aan een jong gezin uit Boston ontpopt hij zich als mysterieuze klopgeest die als enig doel heeft de nieuwkomers te verjagen, zijn voormalig bezit in te nemen en het gedroomde project weer op te pakken.
Gevallen land is een gedreven verhaal, Patrick Flanery weet zijn karakters inhoud te geven en hij smeedt verschillende perspectieven tot een verrassende eenheid. Wat opvalt is de doorlopende onbehaaglijkheid, die vooral gevoed wordt door de keuze van de schrijver voor uitgesproken onsympathieke personages. De plaats van handeling is ellendig, de mensen zijn onaangenaam, zelfs het weer is aan één stuk door dramatisch te noemen. Er is nergens ook maar een sprankje warmte te bekennen.
Indalende kou
Die beklemmende atmosfeer maakt dat Gevallen land van voor tot achter een kille spanning met zich mee blijft dragen. Niet zoals een thriller waar altijd de opmaat naar de ontknopende eindscène op de loer ligt, maar juist een langzaam indalend koufront dat het hele verhaal bekruipt. Dat wordt nog extra benadrukt door de nieuwe bewoners van het huis en hun curieuze werkzaamheden. Julie ontwikkelt in een hightech laboratorium een robot die steeds meer menselijke trekjes krijgt, Nathaniel maakt carrière bij een internationaal beveiligingsconcern dat zich langzaam transformeert tot een controlerende en corrigerende staat-in-een-staat. De sociale gemankeerdheid van de personages stuwt het verhaal naar een rampzalige afloop die niet eens als een verrassing komt.
Als Flanery een visionaire roman wilde schrijven waarin een beeld geschetst wordt van onze samenleving waarin geen stap meer gezet kan worden zonder dat ergens een observerende overheid meekijkt, is hem dat aardig gelukt. De actualiteit wijst uit dat op vele gebieden een dergelijk misbruik van privacy aan de orde van de dag is en Big Brother-achtige taferelen een dreigende werkelijkheid worden. Neemt niet weg dat de overdreven omslagtekst van dit boek, het wervende 'ondraaglijk spannend' nergens echt goed uit de verf komt. De kwalificatie 'benauwd verontrustend' zou hier meer van toepassing zijn.
http://www.8weekly.nl/artikel/11245/p...
@8WEEKLY/André van Dijk
Een ideale wereld bestaat niet, maar wordt op vele fronten en zonder terughoudendheid nagestreefd. In Gevallen land beschrijft Patrick Flanery hoe een maakbare samenleving uit de hand kan lopen en ten onder gaat aan een overdosis veiligheid en controle.
Louise Washington heeft van haar voorouders een flink stuk land en de daarbij behorende boerderij geërfd. Alles uit de nalatenschap van een blanke landeigenaar die in koloniale tijden de zwarte pachters – voormalige slaven – zijn volledige bezit heeft toevertrouwd. Als haar man overlijdt wordt ze gedwongen het landgoed te verkopen aan een projectontwikkelaar die op die plek de uitdijende stad met een protserige buitenwijk wil opsieren.
Dat dit project tot mislukken gedoemd is, wordt door Flanery benauwend beschreven door de maniakale gedrevenheid van deze ondernemer, Paul Krovik, samen te laten vallen met zijn bouwkundige incompetentie. De paradijselijke woonwijk met grote nepklassieke verandavilla's en een gecontroleerde sociale samenhang blijkt niet aan te slaan en het hele plan is ver voor de oplevering al failliet verklaard. Tot overmaat van ramp verliest Krovik zijn eigen modelwoning en wordt hij door vrouw en kinderen verlaten.
Geheime bunker
Langzaam weet de schrijver ons mee te sleuren in zijn geconstrueerde aanloop naar de hedendaagse realiteit. De oude Louise heeft zich illegaal verschanst in haar onteigende boerderij en de afgeserveerde Paul Krovik leeft onzichtbaar in de geheime atoombunker onder zijn verlaten gezinswoning. Als dit huis wordt verkocht aan een jong gezin uit Boston ontpopt hij zich als mysterieuze klopgeest die als enig doel heeft de nieuwkomers te verjagen, zijn voormalig bezit in te nemen en het gedroomde project weer op te pakken.
Gevallen land is een gedreven verhaal, Patrick Flanery weet zijn karakters inhoud te geven en hij smeedt verschillende perspectieven tot een verrassende eenheid. Wat opvalt is de doorlopende onbehaaglijkheid, die vooral gevoed wordt door de keuze van de schrijver voor uitgesproken onsympathieke personages. De plaats van handeling is ellendig, de mensen zijn onaangenaam, zelfs het weer is aan één stuk door dramatisch te noemen. Er is nergens ook maar een sprankje warmte te bekennen.
Indalende kou
Die beklemmende atmosfeer maakt dat Gevallen land van voor tot achter een kille spanning met zich mee blijft dragen. Niet zoals een thriller waar altijd de opmaat naar de ontknopende eindscène op de loer ligt, maar juist een langzaam indalend koufront dat het hele verhaal bekruipt. Dat wordt nog extra benadrukt door de nieuwe bewoners van het huis en hun curieuze werkzaamheden. Julie ontwikkelt in een hightech laboratorium een robot die steeds meer menselijke trekjes krijgt, Nathaniel maakt carrière bij een internationaal beveiligingsconcern dat zich langzaam transformeert tot een controlerende en corrigerende staat-in-een-staat. De sociale gemankeerdheid van de personages stuwt het verhaal naar een rampzalige afloop die niet eens als een verrassing komt.
Als Flanery een visionaire roman wilde schrijven waarin een beeld geschetst wordt van onze samenleving waarin geen stap meer gezet kan worden zonder dat ergens een observerende overheid meekijkt, is hem dat aardig gelukt. De actualiteit wijst uit dat op vele gebieden een dergelijk misbruik van privacy aan de orde van de dag is en Big Brother-achtige taferelen een dreigende werkelijkheid worden. Neemt niet weg dat de overdreven omslagtekst van dit boek, het wervende 'ondraaglijk spannend' nergens echt goed uit de verf komt. De kwalificatie 'benauwd verontrustend' zou hier meer van toepassing zijn.
http://www.8weekly.nl/artikel/11245/p...
@8WEEKLY/André van Dijk
June 25, 2016
"It feels like a land of extreme evil tempered only now and then by idiosyncratic, fallible good"
This is a flawed book and yet it's so magnificently ambitious that it almost can't help but fail to articulate in a single coherent vision all the things that it's trying to say - and its very failure is a testament to its breadth and its moral weight.
I don't want to give away plot points but this is a bleak story of profoundly broken people pushed to extremes and fracturing under pressure.
Flanery is excellent at creating a sinister atmosphere of neuroses and paranoia, from the land which conceals aeons of death, bloodshed and horror and from which something wrong seems to be seeping, to the house itself, a potent symbol of how what should be a place of safety and sanctuary - like the concept of the family - can be broached and violated.
Where the book fails to work as a whole is in joining this story to a secondary commentary in dystopian mode where a menacing corporation has taken over from the public sector to provide community services - schools, prisons, law enforcement - for private profit. The two strands are only tentatively linked through Paul, a sort of apocalyptic survivalist who refuses to see himself as part of a bigger society, and Nathaniel who works for EKK. Flanery has pertinent concerns to voice about ideologies of zero government and the capitalist privatisation of public services but they feel a bit shoe-horned into this book and are not really given room to breathe.
This is a very literate book which makes fine use of allusions and motifs: Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and Orwell's 1984 are explicitly mentioned, and Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw implicitly - though here it's not the attic that we need to worry about, and the `governess' figure is the most sane and given the greatest moral authority over the book. In more popular mode, this exploits horror stories like The Shining, and the plethora of books built around menacing intruders and the fears of what might be inside with us.
So this is an exhilarating, frightening, vast and visionary book - Flanery doesn't quite pull off what he seems to want, but what we're left with, however flawed, is so passionate, so committed, so intelligent and ambitious that it can't be less than a 5-star book.
This is a flawed book and yet it's so magnificently ambitious that it almost can't help but fail to articulate in a single coherent vision all the things that it's trying to say - and its very failure is a testament to its breadth and its moral weight.
I don't want to give away plot points but this is a bleak story of profoundly broken people pushed to extremes and fracturing under pressure.
Flanery is excellent at creating a sinister atmosphere of neuroses and paranoia, from the land which conceals aeons of death, bloodshed and horror and from which something wrong seems to be seeping, to the house itself, a potent symbol of how what should be a place of safety and sanctuary - like the concept of the family - can be broached and violated.
Where the book fails to work as a whole is in joining this story to a secondary commentary in dystopian mode where a menacing corporation has taken over from the public sector to provide community services - schools, prisons, law enforcement - for private profit. The two strands are only tentatively linked through Paul, a sort of apocalyptic survivalist who refuses to see himself as part of a bigger society, and Nathaniel who works for EKK. Flanery has pertinent concerns to voice about ideologies of zero government and the capitalist privatisation of public services but they feel a bit shoe-horned into this book and are not really given room to breathe.
This is a very literate book which makes fine use of allusions and motifs: Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and Orwell's 1984 are explicitly mentioned, and Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw implicitly - though here it's not the attic that we need to worry about, and the `governess' figure is the most sane and given the greatest moral authority over the book. In more popular mode, this exploits horror stories like The Shining, and the plethora of books built around menacing intruders and the fears of what might be inside with us.
So this is an exhilarating, frightening, vast and visionary book - Flanery doesn't quite pull off what he seems to want, but what we're left with, however flawed, is so passionate, so committed, so intelligent and ambitious that it can't be less than a 5-star book.
July 23, 2013
In his two books, Patrick Flanery has developed a consistent focus despite the fact that his debut novel, Absolution, takes place in South America, and this one (hard to believe it's only his second) unfolds in an unnamed city in American's heartland. The state is described at one point as historically conservative, having a new ball park and many skyscrapers. For ease of orientation, I chose St. Louis. The focus I refer to earlier is this: no one owns land. It owns you. At different times, two of the main characters hold proprietary over a desirable parcel of farmland with a violent history. One, Louise, descendent of slaves, was the owner for decades following a lineage that is as original as it is brutal. Forced to sell to Paul Krovik, a land developer, she is granted the right to remain in her family home as Paul proceeds to create his dream of a complex of neo=Victorian homes. The story kicks in when Nathaniel Noeilles (pronounced no-eye, ironic in itself) moves his family rom Boston and buys Paul's dreamhouse in foreclosure. Supreme irony in that Nathaniel's employer which has kicked him upstairs to move to this, for him, unwanted place, is a security company that could be the model for any number of companies in the news today, the today of governmental surveillance and paranoia. The tight security and omnipresent alarms fail to miss the presence of Paul burrowing out in a storm cellar and sneaking into the house at night, or of Louise, camped out in her family home after its been condemned.
I've revealed more plot than usual here since preknowledge of these facts does not detract from the mounting suspense or surprise present on these pages. Merely to lay groundwork for what I feel is Flanery's message: much as land may wield power over a person, they are never capable of taming it entirely. Whether in South Africa or America, the land prevails and waits for the next chapter. Absolution was one of the favorite books I've read this year, and now this is another.
I've revealed more plot than usual here since preknowledge of these facts does not detract from the mounting suspense or surprise present on these pages. Merely to lay groundwork for what I feel is Flanery's message: much as land may wield power over a person, they are never capable of taming it entirely. Whether in South Africa or America, the land prevails and waits for the next chapter. Absolution was one of the favorite books I've read this year, and now this is another.
August 17, 2014
Patrick Flanery has forced me to take a decision I rarely take. That is, having read this as well as his first book, Absolution, I have decided that I will aim to read every book he publishes. Simply put, he is brilliant. Like Absolution, this is a thriller wrapped around a literary novel about the state of a country (this time America). Like Absolution it's also concerned with the truths we tell, the lies we choose, the security we crave and the worlds we create for ourselves. Like Absolution, it never sacrifices intelligence for readability; nor does it ever forget to entertain, grip, surprise and get you turning the pages. A brilliant, startling, urgent novel on America and its citizens, I was reminded in places of Tolkien's Ents - the great, old, wise tree figures from Lord Of The Rings. In this book, trees may not be literally be alive but they are almost characters, providing witness and setting, a sense of agelessness in a fast-changing world, a sense of wisdom when all is self-preservation and loss of perspective. He is a master at creating a sense of place, and here it's the trees that enable him to do that as much as anything. All told, it's a wonderful, daring and hugely enjoyable novel.
September 22, 2013
*SPOILER ALERT* As the description suggests, this haunting book is about the failure of the American dream. Builder Paul Krovik dreams of attaining great wealth through buying land and constructing an estate of faux-traditional homes. Louise Washington, an African-American woman whose family have owned the land for generations, is forced to sell and watch as her beloved farm and surrounding woodlands are destroyed. Krovik's greed and haste to get rich are his undoing as the houses he builds are poorly constructed and his reputation, combined with the financial crisis, leave him in ruins, a fugitive hiding out in a subterranean apartment he built beneath the house that can be accessed through a secret entry in the basement. Evicted from her own home so it can be bulldozed for a road, Louse too becomes an outlaw when she returns to house to live in secrecy until the day she is finally detected and thrown out.
I read this as a metaphor for not just the housing bubble that led to so many people losing their homes, but the degeneration of American society and the greed and stupidity that is undermining it. The book raises many important issues, including the destruction of the environment, the growing power of corporations with profit as their only motive, the loss of privacy and individuality as surveillance technologies become a part of every day life, and the emergence of what could easily transmute into a police state. The spectre of Orwell's 1984 hangs over the book, and is mentioned on at least one occasion. Given recent revelations about the extent of the American government's spying program, I think it's an apt and very timely reference.
The main focus of the book are the events that take place in the house after a new family move in. Paul Krovik wreaks havoc on the lives of the people he considers to be intruders by entering the house while they're sleeping, watching them and moving things around. As he grows increasingly deranged his actions become bolder and more destructive, leading to rape and eventually murder. Copley, the only child in the house, has seen the strange man on several occasions and even knows where he emerges from in the cellar, but no one will believe him. His parents think the trauma of the move has caused him to imagine things and that he is responsible for all the strange goings-on in the house. Their solution is to take him to a psychologist who medicates him to the eyeballs, but things proceed to get worse. His father, Nathaniel, has a very stressful job that is compromising his ideals and making him question who he is. He is unable to cope with what he perceives as his son's wilfully bad behaviour. He finds himself starting to hate Copley and turn into the authoritarian, controlling father he despised as a child. Both parents come from dysfunctional families and the damage parents inflict on children is another theme running through the book, as are bigotry and narrow-mindedness. The fact that Julia and Nathaniel are unable to leave their unhappy pasts behind in Boston show that the crimes of the past cannot easily be forgotten.
This is a grim, haunting book that hovers between horror and psychological thriller. It does give you a lot to think about but I think it tries to tackle too much. Because we learn at the beginning that Krovik is in jail for a horrific but unspecified crime, it lacked narrative tension for me. It's always clear where the book is leading and because I knew they were likely to meet a grisly fate I found myself not wanting to get too close to the characters.
One thing that really bothered me was the fact that even when the weird incidents in the house were becoming more extreme and destructive, Copley's parents never considered installing cameras. The issue was raised just once and never mentioned again, which was a very big and glaring hole in the plot. Even if they believed 100% that Copley was responsible (which his mother didn't) they should have installed cameras to see what kind of state he was in when performing these acts. They also never attempted to confine him in his room at night which would have been the first logical step in dealing with this problem.
I found the ending to be a bit unsatisfying and it was inconceivable to me that Julia would continue to live in the house on her own after what happened there. Another theme I picked up on was the crisis in masculinity and it was interesting that the women were the survivors at the end while the male characters (apart from Paul's sons who escaped with their mother) were dead or in prison. Although it has flaws I would recommend this book because it's a thought-provoking and creepy read. 3.5 stars
I read this as a metaphor for not just the housing bubble that led to so many people losing their homes, but the degeneration of American society and the greed and stupidity that is undermining it. The book raises many important issues, including the destruction of the environment, the growing power of corporations with profit as their only motive, the loss of privacy and individuality as surveillance technologies become a part of every day life, and the emergence of what could easily transmute into a police state. The spectre of Orwell's 1984 hangs over the book, and is mentioned on at least one occasion. Given recent revelations about the extent of the American government's spying program, I think it's an apt and very timely reference.
The main focus of the book are the events that take place in the house after a new family move in. Paul Krovik wreaks havoc on the lives of the people he considers to be intruders by entering the house while they're sleeping, watching them and moving things around. As he grows increasingly deranged his actions become bolder and more destructive, leading to rape and eventually murder. Copley, the only child in the house, has seen the strange man on several occasions and even knows where he emerges from in the cellar, but no one will believe him. His parents think the trauma of the move has caused him to imagine things and that he is responsible for all the strange goings-on in the house. Their solution is to take him to a psychologist who medicates him to the eyeballs, but things proceed to get worse. His father, Nathaniel, has a very stressful job that is compromising his ideals and making him question who he is. He is unable to cope with what he perceives as his son's wilfully bad behaviour. He finds himself starting to hate Copley and turn into the authoritarian, controlling father he despised as a child. Both parents come from dysfunctional families and the damage parents inflict on children is another theme running through the book, as are bigotry and narrow-mindedness. The fact that Julia and Nathaniel are unable to leave their unhappy pasts behind in Boston show that the crimes of the past cannot easily be forgotten.
This is a grim, haunting book that hovers between horror and psychological thriller. It does give you a lot to think about but I think it tries to tackle too much. Because we learn at the beginning that Krovik is in jail for a horrific but unspecified crime, it lacked narrative tension for me. It's always clear where the book is leading and because I knew they were likely to meet a grisly fate I found myself not wanting to get too close to the characters.
One thing that really bothered me was the fact that even when the weird incidents in the house were becoming more extreme and destructive, Copley's parents never considered installing cameras. The issue was raised just once and never mentioned again, which was a very big and glaring hole in the plot. Even if they believed 100% that Copley was responsible (which his mother didn't) they should have installed cameras to see what kind of state he was in when performing these acts. They also never attempted to confine him in his room at night which would have been the first logical step in dealing with this problem.
I found the ending to be a bit unsatisfying and it was inconceivable to me that Julia would continue to live in the house on her own after what happened there. Another theme I picked up on was the crisis in masculinity and it was interesting that the women were the survivors at the end while the male characters (apart from Paul's sons who escaped with their mother) were dead or in prison. Although it has flaws I would recommend this book because it's a thought-provoking and creepy read. 3.5 stars
September 26, 2016
This book seemed to take forever to get going and, when it did, stuttered along in a frustratingly twisted crawl. The first hundred or so pages were entirely taken up by a depressingly sentimental backstory. After that, the main story involves a quarrelling professional couple with their disturbed young son moving from their city home to a large remote house with an unhappy history. If that's not lifted wholesale from "The Shining" I don't know what is. Unfortunately this novel totally lacks the deft narrative style of a Stephen King and bears all the hallmarks of a novice writer more intent to impress rather than to entertain.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 26, 2016
It took me a while to get into this book and I never could read more than a few pages at a time before losing interest or falling asleep. (You could blame that on being a sleep-deprived mother of two, but I'm a voracious reader, so you be the judge...) Honestly, I probably would have abandoned it entirely if I hadn't won my copy through a First Reads giveaway. Because I felt a sense of obligation to finish it, I trudged on.
The characters are all troubled. Their stories are dark; and their common ground is a parcel of land with its own dark secrets.
I don't regret the time spent reading "Fallen Land" but I doubt that I will choose to revisit it.
The characters are all troubled. Their stories are dark; and their common ground is a parcel of land with its own dark secrets.
I don't regret the time spent reading "Fallen Land" but I doubt that I will choose to revisit it.
June 7, 2013
Flanery has written a wonderfully creepy novel that deals with our deep fears on so many levels, from the hidden intruder in the house, who rearranges the furniture and interferes with us in our sleep, to the all-seeing surveillance of big brother that takes away all of our freedoms in the name of security. Flanery slowly ratchets up the tension and creates an unsettling vision of America, divided by its past and confused about the future, at once parochial and paranoid, driving itself mad in search of the enemy within.
August 3, 2014
i expected much more. the story is good but it takes forever to tell. almost all of the characters are negative and the view of our education system, counseling, child abuse, government, security and "big brother" control of our lives is very negative.
i also do not like books that start at point a then got to point f, c, d, b, e and g for the conclusion. end of with a lot of repeating and trying to remember when this event occurred and the cause.
i also do not like books that start at point a then got to point f, c, d, b, e and g for the conclusion. end of with a lot of repeating and trying to remember when this event occurred and the cause.
October 22, 2013
Too much incoherent verbiage. In fits and starts an interesting plot is emerging - with some interesting passages. But half way I gave up. Never really went anywhere. Lots of talking about trees. And words that just didn't make sense to me. Kind of strange. Like several different people were writing one novel.
June 15, 2014
I just did not care about the plot or characters. I think the book was over praised by others to me, therefore the book just did not live up to my expectations. I was expecting the "best book of the year" It was interesting and would make for a good discussion. Probably really a three star, but over sold to me.
June 12, 2015
I thought this was going to be a dystopian science fiction novel, and there was a little of that. It's a bit like The Shining in which a family falls apart in a kind of haunted house setting. But deeper issues are addressed and the characters are so interesting and well written. It's just a great read!
November 18, 2013
Couldn't get into it further than two chapters. While I love imagery and character development, I felt like the author was trying too hard. Everything was laid on a bit thick which made it feel melodramatic. Less would have been more in this case.
May 3, 2014
I could not finish this book. The characters we're believable and I could not care less about them. The plot was ridiculous. I could understand the themes he tried to explore, but it was too heavy-handed. George Orwell meets Stephen King meets B-movie.
March 7, 2014
Couldn't really get into this. There are plenty more books out there!
January 9, 2021
Fallen Land is a very powerful and yet tender book. It was also in many ways a note that I ended 2020 with. Its a very layered book with a bedrock of shifting agrarian world, a central motif of the American Dream which crumbles, layers of plot and characters with great insights, that leave us wanting more of literary fiction.
It spans a long duree of a century from race riots to advanced capitalism in which corporations control law and people. Louise's family of sharecroppers inherit the land which is bought by property developer Paul to make apartments much like Betty Friedan's suburban America. But the reason why Flannery is a master novelist is how gripping the plot and the narrative are. His brilliance is that he never names the land or property and yet the ties to it emerge through the book as Shelter, Burrow and Fall. He brings both the biophysical elements of how it was part of non human world, habitat of indigenous people and then White settlers. Through the collapse of the dream and the land he manages to salvage the goodness through his narrative and characters.
Simultaneously is the American Dream of Paul's who lives and dies by it achieving anything you set your mind too. Probably ideas of a conditional parent that makes him go after a failed dream. He continues to hold on to this failed dream after his flats have sold in a foreclosure and burrows himself in the basement hoping to get back his, house first, then his job, then his family. He tries to scare away the present occupants who work for corporations and technoscience.
It is also a gripping psychological thriller. When Nathaniel begins to hate his son Copley who he suspected of scribbling on the wall and later wanted to take a walk with him in the forest I was really suspicious. The next few pages were even more chilling when the father tries to hoist the son on a tree and Paul tries to save him with a gunshot. At the sound of which the father adds to the filicide by leaving the rope. Paul who has only now surfaced to the reader after his underground days is now convicted for murder. The chapter on a "brief analysis of of my present state of mind by Professor Lovelace" was just the perfect part to quickly catch the breadth and find that Flannerys characters have you by skin of the teeth
Patrick Flannery's coup de grace of Fallen Land for me is in the relationship between landlord and tenant, supervisor and employee, parent and child and Louise with the world. "I come to our land, to that place where the forest reaches all the way to Poplar Road, and the cottonwoods in their thick-trunked waltz bow down and say here you are, Louise, here you come.” Although Louise sold the land to Paul regretting and continuing to live on it she comes out as the vulnerable strong character. Louse stands for the agrarian way of life, visits Paul in prison and believes in Copley. While Nathaniel wants to kill Copley perhaps because that's not what he wanted from himself, Paul is obsessed with getting the house and then his life, Julia is subjecting her child to experiments Louise relationship with the world emerges tender in contrast.
It spans a long duree of a century from race riots to advanced capitalism in which corporations control law and people. Louise's family of sharecroppers inherit the land which is bought by property developer Paul to make apartments much like Betty Friedan's suburban America. But the reason why Flannery is a master novelist is how gripping the plot and the narrative are. His brilliance is that he never names the land or property and yet the ties to it emerge through the book as Shelter, Burrow and Fall. He brings both the biophysical elements of how it was part of non human world, habitat of indigenous people and then White settlers. Through the collapse of the dream and the land he manages to salvage the goodness through his narrative and characters.
Simultaneously is the American Dream of Paul's who lives and dies by it achieving anything you set your mind too. Probably ideas of a conditional parent that makes him go after a failed dream. He continues to hold on to this failed dream after his flats have sold in a foreclosure and burrows himself in the basement hoping to get back his, house first, then his job, then his family. He tries to scare away the present occupants who work for corporations and technoscience.
It is also a gripping psychological thriller. When Nathaniel begins to hate his son Copley who he suspected of scribbling on the wall and later wanted to take a walk with him in the forest I was really suspicious. The next few pages were even more chilling when the father tries to hoist the son on a tree and Paul tries to save him with a gunshot. At the sound of which the father adds to the filicide by leaving the rope. Paul who has only now surfaced to the reader after his underground days is now convicted for murder. The chapter on a "brief analysis of of my present state of mind by Professor Lovelace" was just the perfect part to quickly catch the breadth and find that Flannerys characters have you by skin of the teeth
Patrick Flannery's coup de grace of Fallen Land for me is in the relationship between landlord and tenant, supervisor and employee, parent and child and Louise with the world. "I come to our land, to that place where the forest reaches all the way to Poplar Road, and the cottonwoods in their thick-trunked waltz bow down and say here you are, Louise, here you come.” Although Louise sold the land to Paul regretting and continuing to live on it she comes out as the vulnerable strong character. Louse stands for the agrarian way of life, visits Paul in prison and believes in Copley. While Nathaniel wants to kill Copley perhaps because that's not what he wanted from himself, Paul is obsessed with getting the house and then his life, Julia is subjecting her child to experiments Louise relationship with the world emerges tender in contrast.
July 8, 2017
This book just doesn't work. The devolution of the central couple from their point of origin is too abrupt; their response to various assaults on their lives too passive. The reader is supposed to believe that in a few short months parents who had been caring and attentive are sleeping with a shut door and ear plugs when they believe their young son is experiencing extreme and dangerous sleep disturbances? As a metaphor it's pretty obvious, but there is no transition between these characters as reasonably aware actors in their own lives to stuporous automatons.
I don't think the characterization of this novel as a "near-future dystopia" is accurate. There's nothing "near-future" about the actual events, other than that the aims of the privatized "corrections" system are explicitly stated rather than obfuscated in neoliberal jargon - and for all I know they are so bluntly outlined in those corporate offices. There is probably a charter school somewhere run on the appalling principles of the one in the book. The dispossession of the Black woman landowner and the implosion of the contractor's debt-financed business are ordinary events. I found the story arc of those two characters more believable, even though one is quite extreme.
The extended paeans to "The Land! The Land!" do not work for me. Less would have been more.
I don't think the characterization of this novel as a "near-future dystopia" is accurate. There's nothing "near-future" about the actual events, other than that the aims of the privatized "corrections" system are explicitly stated rather than obfuscated in neoliberal jargon - and for all I know they are so bluntly outlined in those corporate offices. There is probably a charter school somewhere run on the appalling principles of the one in the book. The dispossession of the Black woman landowner and the implosion of the contractor's debt-financed business are ordinary events. I found the story arc of those two characters more believable, even though one is quite extreme.
The extended paeans to "The Land! The Land!" do not work for me. Less would have been more.
June 15, 2025
bro holy sh!t (is swearing allowed on goodreads?)
okayyy so this is possibly the shortest it’s taken me to read more from an author after reading them for the first time. i loved absolution for its new to me setting and historical context— i’ll be looking for more 2000s south african fiction— and its characters and structure. the same is true for fallen land.
the land, or rather the things that happen on it, is stuck in a cycle of good and bad. there were years of good when my favorite character louise was the main stewardess of it, and a long cycle of bad ending (we hope) at the end of this book. i was really satisfied with the character arcs. you think you know how things are going to end and you’re dreading it but when they finally shake out, it’s in a way you don’t expect but it works so good. its free julia til its backwards.
flanery’s second approach to the topic of the safety and sanctity of the home, this time in the american context, is scarily clairvoyant.
okayyy so this is possibly the shortest it’s taken me to read more from an author after reading them for the first time. i loved absolution for its new to me setting and historical context— i’ll be looking for more 2000s south african fiction— and its characters and structure. the same is true for fallen land.
the land, or rather the things that happen on it, is stuck in a cycle of good and bad. there were years of good when my favorite character louise was the main stewardess of it, and a long cycle of bad ending (we hope) at the end of this book. i was really satisfied with the character arcs. you think you know how things are going to end and you’re dreading it but when they finally shake out, it’s in a way you don’t expect but it works so good. its free julia til its backwards.
flanery’s second approach to the topic of the safety and sanctity of the home, this time in the american context, is scarily clairvoyant.
January 15, 2021
This very well written novel catches your attention from the very first page. In many ways it could be classified as a thriller, but as you read on it is not only the intense nerve which makes you read on, but even more importantly it is the depth in relevance and analysis of our own temporary lifestyle and society, moreover our unwillingness to pay attention to the patterns of history and our need for real relationships with the people and environment we are surrounded by.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 31, 2017
So much going on. I like how the author moves around switching viewpoints. So much distrust. The story dragged along is some spots, but I think it was necessary for the reader to understand each character. The story didn't end on a happy note with everything resolved. But that was okay with me. It was the inevitable ending to a story like this.
June 23, 2020
This took way too long to get going. The blurb in Norwegian wasn't the best, so I was also, like other readers, unaware it's a thriller/dystopian near-future sci-fi until I was halfway through. I will say that it had moments of greatness, and that it was interesting reading a very different kind of book to what I normally read!
August 11, 2020
This book is a lot, a gripping story, with some insightful commentary on topics like incarceration, education, our links to history and the land, parent/child relationships. Somehow it manages to do all these things remarkably well, one of the best books I've read recently.
January 1, 2018
Het verhaal komt heel moeizaam op gang. En de schrijver verliest zich dikwijls in nietszeggende details. Beschrijvingen van omgeving zijn soms saai verwoord. Ik vond het niet geweldig.
February 21, 2018
This story just didn't grab me. The writing is good, the story is just so-so.
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