War, they say, is 98% boredom and 2% terror. I suspect that
the end of the world, when it comes, will be much the same. This can pose a bit
of a problem for a dystopian novelist.
Terry Tyler's Tipping
Point draws together several contemporary issues to make a worryingly
convincing scenario for the end of the world. The population is growing out of
control. The government builds up dossiers on people by spying on their social
media feeds. When a virus is deliberately released in Britain, the poor, the
unemployed, the sick, immigrants and political troublemakers are left to die,
while useful citizens are vaccinated and survive.
That's the plan, anyway. Almost
inevitably, the plan goes wrong. The virus makes its way into the population
before the vaccinations are completed and a pandemic more or less wipes out the
population of Britain. There are suggestions it's rampaging across the world,
but with no communications, no TV, no Internet, nobody is really sure what's
going on anywhere.
Tipping Point follows the lives of a
few of the survivors as they make their way through a landscape of burned-out
villages, looted shopping centres, and abandoned towns. Everybody has to come
to terms with the reality of life without electricity or running water. People
band together and arm themselves in a world where order has broken down and the
strong take what they can from the weak.
There are some nice touches. The
whole thing, it is suggested, was an American plot. The virus was first
released in Britain, with British government consent, because the islands
provide a convenient area for a field test. (That seems to nail the special
relationship more accurately than many more overtly satirical books.) There is
the social media app that has been set up to guarantee your privacy that is
owned and run by the government who access all of it. The plan eliminates the
intellectual and scientific classes as well as the poor and useless because, as
one character conveniently explains, “We want the worker bees. Mr and Mrs Average, of commonplace intelligence, who –
if they ever stopped to think about it, which they don't – know that society
works best when the masses take direction from the few, without question, and
everybody knows their place.”
The main insight, though, is that
life after the apocalypse is, once you have survived the immediate
conflagration, extraordinarily dreary. Survivors raid toy shops for board
games, unable to play on their computers. With no TV or video, they are reduced
to reading – and reading real books, rather than Kindles.
Anybody who has read Terry Tyler's
Twitter feed will know that she is a big fan of The Walking Dead and Tipping
Point sets us up nicely for the zombie apocalypse (people even refer to it
in conversation) except that there are no zombies. The result is that, despite
a large cast of characters – nicely defined and easily kept track of – there is
really not a lot happening.
Terry Tyler writes very readable
and pleasant prose, which makes it easy to carry on despite a lack of incident.
When exciting things do happen (escaping through a checkpoint, fleeing a
would-be rapist) the story rattles along and the underlying ideas are genuinely
interesting, but every 50 pages or so I find myself agreeing with the
characters that life after the apocalypse is really, really dull.
The book is the first of a trilogy
and by the end of Book 1 different characters – the good, the bad, the ditzy
and the borderline psychopathic – have all independently decided to flee to
Lindisfarne. It wouldn't be my choice of refuge, but I'm not writing the book.
Volume 2 may well see more incident. But in the end, there's not that much that
can happen. Most people are dead and those who are left are battling to cope
with the day-to-day business of survival. It’s 98% boredom and, though Terry
Tyler’s writing isn’t boring, I can’t help wishing there were zombies …
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