Miku the Literary Cat Review: John Christopher - The World in Winter
HELL HAS FROZEN OVER BUT RACISM IS STILL ALIVE AND WELL
Miku’s take:
This one was unusual because at first she only picked it up every now and then, like it was hard work or something, but once she was about half way through the pages she suddenly wouldn’t put it down. Even when I did a cute meow. It was terrible.
From what I heard her tell my Dad, this one was about the stuff she normally likes (end of the world and so on) but it also had a theme of racism which is unique to owner species and something us cats judge you for.
I heard her say “yikes” quite a lot so I think some of the words were surprising to her, but then the fact that you have racism in your culture is surprising to us.
Four paws out of four because it’s a short book she finished reasonably quickly and then fed me dinner. Nearly deducted a paw because it turns out she hid medicine in my dinner but I suppose it’s for my own good.
Miku’s Mum’s take:
In The World in Winter a natural disaster of a premature ice age falls over the majority of the northern hemisphere. The white European main characters are then faced with a choice. Stay and freeze or escape to Lagos, Africa, where the quality of life is not assured. They become refugees and try and forge a living at the bottom of the pile. The way Christopher pulls the rug out from underneath the displaced characters time and again until they have nothing left is brutal. But then so is fleeing one hell hole to become a refugee. And that’s his point.
The copy I have has an introduction by Hari Kunzru which succinctly wraps up the what-if scenario with “Imagine if you will, that the Oxford brogue is on the other foot.” For its time this book would have been a progressive exercise. It asks the white middle class reader to put themselves in the position of the immigrant and wonder how they would like to be treated. It is, however, very much of the era it was written and several passages had me wincing with the choice of language, despite the intention.
As Kunzru puts it “Christopher is no white supremacist, indeed his anger at crude prejudice is there on the page.” That’s not to say the way he writes doesn’t have a snow drift’s worth of “yikes” moments.
