In these novels, rebellion must be expressed obliquely. In these novels of bad futures, the trustworthy memories of protagonists such as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith (“Airstrip One… had been called England or Britain, though London, felt fairly certain, had always been called London”) are replaced by the self-delusions of narrators who mislead the reader and themselves lose control of the stories they are telling. Holmqvist cleverly makes that very self unreliable The Unit is the latest in a trend of anti-heroic dystopias such as Never Let Me Go and P.D. The novel grips toward the end when Dorrit finds love-and with it a potential escape-and makes a startling choice.ĭorrit’s play-by-play narration can be clunky in translation, but the spare, cumulative prose effectively reveals a character whose story can barely ward off the disintegration of the self it relates. These snippets of memory are interspersed with descriptions of the eponymous unit and its dying inhabitants, descriptions so matter-of-fact they lull. Through flashbacks, we learn of all Dorrit has lost-her career as a novelist, her beloved dog, the small house she owned herself, the opportunities to save herself by becoming “useful” to society. The Unit’s heroine, Dorrit, has chosen not to have children and thus “spill over like rising bread dough” at the book’s opening, Dorrit’s independence has just earned her incarceration in the Unit, a death camp puzzlingly replete with art galleries and gourmet restaurants where her individualism seems to lapse into passivity. The Unit uncannily echoes its organ-donation-dystopia predecessor, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) both imagine societies of extreme utilitarianism that plunder their margins for body parts, and both raise the prospect of art for art’s sake, and love for love’s, as weapons against such thinking.

In The Unit, all childless women over fifty and childless men over sixty are classified as “dispensable” and removed to facilities where they take part in scientific experiments and eventually donate all of their organs to “needed” individuals. This is a dystopia for a shrinking country. Only a Scandinavian dystopia would unravel in a setting “furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors” such as “eggshell white.” And only a Scandinavian dystopia, perhaps, would see mandatory paternal leave as a slippery slope to compulsory childcare and then to compulsory parenthood and the criminalization of traditional gender roles.

The unit holmqvist