It’s not exactly original when reviewing Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army to compare it with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but it does seem pretty hard to avoid. Both are post-apocalyptic dystopias seen through the eyes of a female narrator; both feature control of female fertility as a central manifestation of how the authorities impose themselves on lives of women; and both make use of the idea that their narratives are historical eyewitness accounts (in Atwood’s book the epilogue sees Offred’s account being discussed at a symposium for historical studies).

We never find out the name of The Carhullan Army’s narrator, knowing her only as Sister. When the novel begins she is a dissatisfied citizen of the Cumbrian town of Rith: subjected to strict rationing; forcibly fitted with a contraceptive coil; trapped in a loveless marriage with a man whose ideals have been crushed by the awful realities of life in a no-longer-democratic country, which is in a state of perpetual war and environmental meltdown. We can hardly blame Sister for wanting to escape, and she plans meticulously for it – literally heading for the hills one morning, to the pre-breakdown, female-only commune of Carhullan Farm.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead

When setting out to describe a dystopia that has developed out of a society familiar to the reader, it strikes me that writers have two choices: either adopt the fantasy-worldbuilding style of providing the reader with lots of context, background detail and historical in-fill; alternatively, keep the exact nature of the cataclysm and its consequences shadowy and impressionistic, only hinting at the causes and wider effects. The latter is the approach taken by Atwood, and by George Orwell in the ultimate benchmark for dystopian fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s an approach that gives them plenty of scope to explore wider themes without having to be drawn in to the nitty gritty, except where it impacts on their protagonist’s daily existence. Hall, regrettably, falls somewhere in the middle: in quite concentrated form at the beginning of the book we get all sorts of indications of the factors contributing to the breakdown of society. It’s a bit of a check-list of current concerns: global warming, an energy crisis, a food crisis, the breakdown the the ozone layer, in the UK the rise of nationalism and in the US the breaking down of the formal barrier between church and state. It’s every Guardian reader’s worst nightmare (and perhaps I should declare that I am a Guardian reader!) – but it gives enough detail to make me want to know more (when did this happen? what year is it now?), while simultaneously making me wonder whether someone writing a contemporary account would include this level of information. Wouldn’t they just assume the reader knew it all already? It’s a problem of form – how to reconcile providing background to the dystopia, about which the reader is naturally curious, with the use of a contemporaneous first-person narrative, without resorting to clumsy exposition.

The narrative describes Sister’s journey to Carhullan, and her acceptance in to the community there. Carhullan was founded by Jackie, a charismatic former soldier, and when Sister arrives it is in the midst of a big change: from a commune concentrating on self-sufficiency, it is becoming an armed encampment, with Jackie training up a cadre of women for defense, and more. As the first woman to arrive at Carhullan since the emergency began, Sister is an object of considerable curiosity among the others, and she is mesmerised by Jackie. Carhullan is far from an ideal community – there are internal divisions and factions, and even a small satellite community of men, some of whom seem to be treated primarily as providers of sexual services. In this passage, Sister describes her first sight of the assembled community of Carhullan:

Facing me were women of all ages, some with grey in their hair, some with long braids, and others with eccentrically cropped styles. They were mostly dressed as the women I had met on the moors had been, with thrift and a certain bespoke artistry. Some had overalls that seemed extreme and inventive, tribal almost. Others had panels and shapes shaved into their heads. They wore straps of leather around their wrists and upper arms, and stone pendants; their smocks and shirts were cut down, resewn, and there was a small girl among them with her face painted blue, and blue stains on her jumper.

The story builds up to a tipping point where the continued independence of Carhullan appears to be in doubt, and Jackie’s plans move from defense to attack, with Sister throwing her lot in with the martial faction. We see the lengths that Jackie is willing to go to protect her independence, and Sister is drawn along with her, a trusted lieutenant. Then it’s time for the Carhullan Army to attempt its takeover of Sister’s hometown, Rith, and it all goes horribly wrong: both for the book, and the characters. It goes wrong for the book because Hall resorts to an awful cop-out to circumvent the need to actually describe the events of the attack and occupation of Rith. This takes the form of the stark phrase:

[data lost]

I can’t begin to say how annoying I found this. While I can see that Hall may have wanted to avoid writing a protracted, urban warfare section, which would have made this a much longer book, the way she goes about it completely derails the story, and takes us straight to an ending that feels rushed and unsatisfactory. We never get to discover how Sister found her experiences of guerrilla warfare against the Authority, how the local populace responded to their liberation, or why the Authority was eventually able to take back control of Rith. Perhaps most importantly, we don’t see whether the influence of Jackie draws Sister in to further militarily expedient moral compromises in the name of ‘the greater good’. I felt rather cheated.

It’s a terribly underwhelming ending for a book that I was enjoying up to that point. Hall’s evocations of the bleak landscapes of the Lake District are great; despite some issues with exposition, Sister is a convincing and sympathetic narrator; and the military aspects of the story that Hall does actually include are well researched and convincing. While The Carhullan Army is not a perfect book, it was shaping up very well until its misguided abbreviation of a critical portion of the narrative. The end result is a novel that is sadly less than the sum of its parts.

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