I finished this one on the plane on the way over. It is clearly very well written (and indeed has won a mainstream literary award). As a feminist SF dystopia, however, I found it somewhat lacking. The book is very good on the medical and dietary issues you are likely to encounter when trying to run a completely self-sufficient commune in the wilds of Cumbria. The technology and political aspects of the book, on the other hand, are rather naive, and if I didn’t know better I’d suspect it of having been written in the 1970s. If I see it getting praised by men I shall be suspicious that they like it because they feel it proves to them what awful people feminists are.
3 thoughts on “The Carhullan Army”
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I enjoyed it, but the biggest plot problem I had with it was the idea that the likely response to lack of oil would be to herd people into cities and rely on food imports. I would have thought the opposite, ie reverting to the pre-industrial model of primarily rural life, was a lot more likely.
I could probably make a case for it, but I don’t think that justifying the state of her future was a priority for Hall. She was much more interested in having a setting that allowed the story she wanted to tell. You can do that in SF, but you have to set things a lot further away from the real world, which she was probably also reluctant to do. And of course justifying your deviations from reality are much less of an issue for non-SF readers, who were probably the main target audience.