In Marcel Theroux’s Far North we have a classic example of that occasional occurrence, the literary science fiction novel. Following in the footsteps of Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake) and Sarah Hall (The Carhullan Army), Theroux has created a vision of life after the fall of civilisation, and as in those books, many of the details are kept relatively opaque. What distinguishes Far North in some ways is the focus on a very unusual set of communities and how they are affected by the terrible events that must have befallen the world. American religious communities, Quakers and such, were invited to settle in Siberia, founding a number of towns – but when disaster strikes, the communities are too shallow-rooted to survive and their stateless citizens succumb to all manner of hardships.

CAUTION: Review contains mild spoilers

Our narrator, Makepeace, is a law officer in one such town – although by the time we are first introduced, there are hardly any people left and Makepeace is focused solely on survival. I can’t sustain for the duration of this review the same trick that the blurb writers use for Far North, which is to avoid the use of any pronouns – that means I have to reveal the surprise, sprung on us a few chapters in, that Makepeace is actually a woman. It’s an effective trick: everything about both the set-up (self-sufficient law enforcer trying to hold back the tides of disorder) and the actual narrative voice is designed to imply that Makepeace is a man, right up until the point she reveals her true gender. Physically and emotionally scarred from things that happened to her during her teenage years, she has suppressed her identity as a woman, subsuming it in to a lawman persona that’s wholly convincing, no more so than when she takes bloody revenge on a Tungu herdsman who tries to cheat her out of goods she traded for fair and square.

The beginning of the book is defined by Makepeace’s discovery of and developing friendship with Ping, a refugee from a slave column that passed closed to the town. Despite their lack of a shared language, they develop a bond, and when Ping dies, Makepeace is bereft, abandoning the town and striking out in to the wilderness. A suicide attempt is aborted by the sight of a plane crash, and the idea that there might be more planes like it comes to symbolise the persistence of civilisation somewhere – finding that civilisation becomes Makepeace’s mission, and gives her hope through all that follows.

What she finds instead are isolated stockades of suspicious settlers, slave camps and worse. Betrayed in to slavery, Makepeace experiences the brutality of labour camp, but gradually works her way up to a position of trust – her foray forth, in to the Zone (perhaps a former Soviet nuclear research facility), forces her to make a choice between friends she made while still an inmate, and her new-found responsibilities. An intensely moral character, you always know what her choice will have to be.

Far North presents a bleak vision of the future that cannot be any more coherent than the understanding one character can gain of the world around her, when all channels of communication have broken down. It avoids the exposition that can seriously hurt this kind of story, and instead uses the scenario as a backdrop to explore human nature and our ability to carry on in difficult circumstances. Theroux appears to feel that while the human race might survive the fall, human civilisation as we now know it would be one of the first casualties. Makepeace is a compelling narrator, an excellent companion on the journey, and in her, the author is perhaps demonstrating that the virtues of self-sufficiency and moral integrity can endure the virtual end of society. A paean to staying true to your values and beliefs, however tough the times, and a very enjoyable book.

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