They by Kay Dick
A British dystopian novel from the 70s reissued by McNally Editions with an afterword by Lucy Scholes
By Kay Dick, with an afterword by Lucy Scholes
128 pages. McNally Editions. $18.00.
I usually prefer afterwords to forewords, but I think Lucy Scholes’s afterword to Kay Dick’s 1977 novel They would have worked better if it had been placed before the text of the novel. They, recently reissued by McNally Editions1, is an almost surrealist depiction of dystopian Britain, and Scholes informs us that the novel was a “surreptitious late-career aberration” in Kay Dick’s literary career, which otherwise hewed closer to the conventions of social and psychological realism. ‘Aberration” is exactly what They feels like - not a psychedelic hallucination, but a sudden bad dream that hits upon someone who is otherwise cogent and committed to a careful appreciation of the world, a brief but total breakdown of all the steady assumptions and stalwart values we carry through our lives.
The subtitle of They is “A Sequence of Unease.” The word “Sequence” is a loose, nebulous term, but the structure of the novel is similarly loose and nebulous. None of the novel’s nine chapters are connected to each other by any sort of narrative through-line. In fact, not a single named character appears in more than one chapter, and it’s left ambiguous as to whether the unnamed narrator in each chapter is ever the same person. Nor do we ever receive a definitive beginning or end to each of the little stories we get a glance into. And yet the chapters cannot be called fragments, for fragments suggest a part of a greater whole, and no greater whole can exist in the world of this novel.
But the novel does have a protagonist: the They of the title. The They, as we gradually learn, comprise most of the British population in this eerie world, and They have taken over the country and rendered all previous political and social relations ineligible. They are humans, but They behave like ants, like a hive mind where each person acts in concert with the rest without expressing any individuality.
A small percentage of the population is left with their personality intact. These non-They (a term of my own, for the characters lack the language to describe their situation) are able to live a precarious existence in certain countryside locations, but their activities are sharply limited. Though the rules are never clear, the They destroy every artistic object They come across, be it of the past or present, and They disapprove of certain living arrangements. The trick to survival, it seems, is to live, in outward appearance, as much like the They as possible, in order to retain some level of autonomy in a very circumscribed private life, a life of hushed conversations at night indoors.
For all its strangeness, the core conflict of They is familiar to dystopian fiction: the struggle of existence for creative, independent thinkers in a totalitarian, conformist world. What prevents They from becoming a manichean morality tale that pits dissident individuals against the herd-like masses is how utterly it refuses to romanticize, to even dramatize this situation. While the novel is told in first person, the narrator (or narrators) never describe their interior life; in fact, at times it feels so hopeless that its characters have even lost the capacity for despair, with only a passivity that becomes a non-thinking.
Strangely, the passivity of the non-They comes out most strikingly in how plainly and clearly they are able to state their circumstances to the best of their knowledge. But this straightforwardness both conceals the uncertainty of their situation and reveals how incapable their seemingly mundane language is to describe this otherworldly horror. The brief conversations are some of the most chilling parts of this novel:
‘They instil fear in the retreats. Fear of the world outside. No harm can reach one in a retreat. Quick acclimatization to loss of identity guaranteed.’
‘And identity holds danger?’ I knew it did.
‘Wide open to it. Constantly vulnerable. The retreats offer peace - or should one say a vacuum of invulnerability.’
The short, clipped sentences here are emblematic - they are the novel in miniature, a sequence without a narrative. What the characters are discussing - the dangers of freely chosen identity versus the safety of docile conformity - should be emotionally charged, either with sentiment or fear, but their rote, cool resignation to this fact (the narrator asking a question she already knows the answer to) makes it alienating.
“Unease” - that other key word in Dick’s subtitle. Unease in They is not so much a feeling, but the absence of feeling, the state of being that remains when the mind cannot work as it usually does, when it is taken away from normal human society. The fear, disorientation, and anomie of the novel are not so much what the characters feel, but what shapes their environment.
Another interesting fact from Scholes’s afterword: Kay Dick was friends with George Orwell, and she served as the editor of some of his works. But her vision of a dystopian Britain could not be more different from Orwell’s. Orwell’s Airstrip One of 1984 is a precisely mapped-out, carefully-explained society, with clear similarities to the totalitarian societies that had arisen in his lifetime. But the world of They is purposefully ambiguous, contradictory, its features shaped by the mind’s terrors rather than the structure of an organized polity. They is more powerful from what it expresses than what it is. And once the novel is finished, it does not leave us with a clear message, but simply a group of strange images and moods that we struggle to decipher. Do I wake or sleep?
Be sure to read my reviews of other books reissued by the new publisher McNally Editions, Winter Love and Troy Chimneys.