2022

by Alison Greaves

This book, set in the year 2022, was first published in 2012. It is now 2022 in reality. For most of the intervening period it seemed that we were indeed sleepwalking into the dystopian future depicted in the novel, thanks to constant attacks on the NHS, education and the Welfare State, together with a growing tendency to blame the wrong people for society's ills. Britain then decided to leave the EU. Then, out of the blue, we were visited by a global pandemic which led to the kind of restrictions on our everyday lives we could never have anticipated. The main protagonist in this novel does not recognise the world she wakes up to after ten years in a coma. In the real world today, many of us feel the same way.

The year is 2022, the place Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Natasha Ross, a young schoolteacher, wakes up after ten years in a coma to find herself in a totalitarian state of constant surveillance, armed guards on the streets and even bin inspections. There has been ethnic cleansing, the Welfare State has been dismantled, and the sick and unemployed are being sent to labour camps like criminals. Women are gradually being removed from the workplace and Natasha, unable to support herself, finds herself dependent on her nearest male relative, her sister's husband, the sinister Jason Saunders.

191 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2012

Reviews

[feimineach · Rating 3 out of 5]

2022 got there in the end, I think. It became rather too Comment-is-Free in style in places but the ideas were interesting. I would have liked a little more depth in terms of how we got to where we are in 2022 and the extent to which the system is supported etc. (coalition government was bad, though true, and that's what happened, didn't really explore it all). That said, 2022 did illustrate I suppose the slippery slope (man, did I really just say that!) of conservative thinking and policies, particularly in terms of effects on women, even if its grip on political philosophy was pretty light.

[Markm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like books with political and social bite. Most of my favourites are the classics, but this one is very contemporary, very current, and all the more scary for it. It could actually happen.