Not all dystopias are futuristic. A discomfiting part of Wyl Menmuir’s Fox Fires (pages) is that it could plausibly happen now. The plot centers on Wren Lithgow, who has followed her mother, a concert pianist, around cities in Europe for two decades, much of her lifetime. Their journey takes her to the city-state of O, an amalgam of many continental European cities, vaguely eastern, yet not a place one might find on any map. Wren was conceived in O, and hopes to find her absentee father there. 

A sense of estrangement runs deep in O, as in this moment when Wren arrives at the house her mother, Cleo, has rented for her concerts in this disconcerting land:

1166 Gylinncourtstristre is a grand house in the middle of a row of grand houses that face the wide, slow waters of the Meret. These houses date back to before the war, by which we do not mean our more recent skirmishes but the second great war during and after which O changed hands several times before being left, once again, to its own devices. These houses are survivors and they are reserved for dignitaries. Most of them have sat empty in recent years and in the weeks before Wren and Cleo arrive, the rooms are aired, layers of dust removed from the windowsills and kitchen surfaces, and various bugs and recording devices are checked, standard practice. 

The motive behind the house’s surveillance remains unknown, and its discovery is uncertain. Still, Wren surrenders herself to O, adopting its language (“O-chian”), and becoming involved with a photographer who becomes her boyfriend. The city has an eerie quality, fringed with the promise of surveillance. The boyfriend takes freelance assignments from a government ministry, a circumstance Wren becomes increasingly wary of until, finally, she finds he has been documenting her in a file. Unrevealed are the reasons and methods behind his actions, though their nature aligns with the endemic, Stasi-like surveillance within this society. 

The surveillance leads to a crisis with her boyfriend, of course, and after the relationship disintegrates, Wren muses on him with a touch of justified vindictiveness:

She tries to put him out of mind, but she often looks for him in the street. She sees elements of him reflected in other men, in their features and mannerisms. She hopes he is unable to concentrate on the images he is being paid to capture, that he expects at any moment to see her walking by or emerging from one of the buildings on which he has his camera trained. She hopes that he obsesses, that he stays behind the lens for longer than he needs to, in the hope that he will find a clue, that when he is not working, he retreats to his darkroom and even there he cannot forget her.

Nobody is let off the hook, the curse of vengeance being so human. Even so, the story’s sole disappointment hovers in its conclusion. An unwinding occurs that I will not detail here other than to say it runs against the complex mood of the story and feels constructed as if to avoid a ruthlessly bleak ending. 

Menmuir is a British novelist from Cornwall. While Britain did not experience the tyrannical surveillance common in so many Eastern European countries following WWII, the legacy of nearby oppression makes itself felt in Menmuir’s prose. The cover blurb mentions Kafka and Calvino as comparable authors. But I wonder whether Ernst Junger’s The Marble Cliffs and The Glass Bees might be equally apt comparisons. Junger has the same dreamlike pacing and rapturous prose, swelling with doom for a lost present. Junger is an unfair comparison because of his personal history, which included an intense early flirtation with Nazism before a muted condemnation of it. Menmuir’s work (and career) exhibits no such conflict. I am also reminded of Ursula K. Leguin’s early collection of stories about a fictional country, Orsinian Tales. The precise geographical location of these imagined countries is not as important as the atmosphere of ancient suspicion. For readers looking for still more reads in a similar key might also look into Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppes and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. 

Overall, Fox Fires is a powerful read and superlatively written. Menmuir avoids the main pitfall of the dystopian genre, which is to become vatic and prescriptive, and ideological. Menmuir’s success lies in extending empathy to where it meets its moral level. The best dystopias are not a cudgel but a mirror. 

-Vic Peterson, author of The Berserkers