The Parameters of the New Dystopia

THE UNINVITED, LIZ JENSEN'S most recent novel, reads, at one level, fairly continuously with The Rapture. This last text is again ultimately an ecothriller, although this does not become apparent until fairly late on in the novel: rather than starting off from an ecological premise, it works toward one. Although this is to a certain extent true of The Rapture, too, in the last novel the ecological theme emerges still more slowly, and again like the previous novel, The Uninvited portrays a detective-like scientific investigation.

A number of parallels can be found between the treatment of ecological themes in The Rapture and The Uninvited. Like the earlier novel, The Uninvited paints a dystopic landscape in casual brushstrokes, mentioning, in passing, “the threatened extinction of honeybees” (97), and “crossspecies disease scares” (193). Echoing Gabrielle's “interesting times” leitmotiv in The Rapture, Hesketh evokes “dysfunctional times” (5). However, while extreme weather conditions and their effects are present in the background in the later novel, they are not much foregrounded. There is a fleeting reference to a hurricane: “Hurricane Veronica struck during the night, devastating towns on Ireland's western shore before strafing its way up the Scottish coast” (41), but this is not a key event in the plot. Paradoxically, in the depiction of a dystopic world close to ours, the UK economy is strong, with “growth figures up for the third consecutive season” (4)—perhaps a precondition for an effective portrayal of a movement that seeks to destroy capitalism.

Whereas The Rapture depicts freak weather events and major ecodisasters caused by fracking, The Uninvited is particularly concerned, first, with the drying up of the world's water resources and the subsequent transformation of certain geophysical characteristics of the Earth—for example, Lake Orumieh in Iran (127) is turning into a salt wasteland, for which climate change is widely believed to be responsible—and second, with the physiological and socioeconomic adaptation of the human race to the new environment. While certain details change, there is more continuity than discontinuity between the last two novels, in that the pathology of the planet—to look at it anthropomorphically—remains the same:parasited by humans beings, it risks destruction.