2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Chilling future of a UK where women can't carry a pregnancy to term
But that would mean missing out on a novel that's as captivating as it is chilling, a study of a teenage girl coming of age in an utterly changed world that, like her, is still finding its feet.
This post-apocalyptic tale from the Aberdeenshire-born Heather Critchlow takes place a few decades in the future, after the outbreak of a disease that isn't just worse than Covid, it's worse than the Black Death, furiously contagious and killing everyone it infects.
The government's attempts to speed along production of an effective vaccine have failed.
They can only come up with one plan to safeguard the future: gathering up trainloads of children who haven't yet been exposed to the virus and transporting them to secure camps in the countryside.
Marianne is the government's press secretary, and also the Prime Minister's secret lover.
However, her loyalty falters when she learns in cabinet meetings that the vaccine is ineffective, and she goes completely rogue after being approached by a shadowy stranger who informs her that places in the camps aren't being allocated fairly but going to those whose parents can pay – and that sometimes the trains aren't even full.
The Tomorrow Project by H Critchlow (Image: free) Horrified, she takes part in a clandestine effort to smuggle children aboard using her government ID.
The very last of them is seven-year-old Maia. So a kid from a tower block in south London is smuggled into a group of privileged children to spend the next ten years in a fenced-off, self-sufficient compound.
No one leaves or enters, and the gates are gradually choked with vines as nature reclaims the surrounding land. With no communication with the outside world, they could be the last humans on Earth.
Life is geared towards survival at all costs, and after a decade the community's morale is waning. No one has been able to carry a pregnancy to term, and crops are failing due to the soil becoming exhausted.
The prospect of this last spark of humanity dying out, combined with Maia's compulsion to return to London and seek out her old home, strengthens her resolve to head out into the unknown.
With its echoes of the 1970s TV series Survivors, Critchlow's careful world-building frames Maia's own coming-of-age story.
Although the camp is united in its sense of loss, the world they're mourning is one that Maia was wrenched out of when she was still too young to understand it.
"Her memories are blurs and half-truths, mythology she spins from the pieces."
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Her bond with boyfriend Finn, the first friend she made in the camp, and now her first love, isn't enough to fill the void left inside her by the loss of her mother and her childhood home.
Critchlow's two crime novels to date have been good, but she really comes into her own here.
The undercurrent of bleakness is never quite dispelled, but rays of hope shine through the darkness as Maia soldiers on, determined to make some kind of life for herself.
Once she hits the road, Critchlow's immersive depiction of the relationships and politics of an insular, fearful community is left behind, replaced by the sobering imagery of the world outside its gates, where humanity's works are being swallowed up by nature faster than anyone imagined, evoking feelings of terror but also a powerful sense of mystery and wonder.
