The signature of an enchantress.' Edna O'Brien'I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.' Lauren Groff'Deft, dread filled, hypnotic and hopeful. Lost for half a century, newly introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.'Delicious and sexy and downright chilling. Soon the National Gallery is purged eerie towers survey the coast mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist.THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity.Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. John Mandel'As creepy, tense and strange as when I first read it 40 years ago.' Ian RankinThis is Britain: but not as we know it.THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Insidiously horrifying!' Margaret Atwood'A masterpiece of creeping dread.' Emily St. Its disconcerting power lies in its dream logic and elisions - the unexplained background, the offstage violence.As heard on BBC Radio 4's Front Row: the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.'A creepily prescient tale. She was 62 and reputedly curmudgeonly when she published the novel, a cri de coeur against urbanisation, technology and youth culture: ‘Passing through industrial cities I sweated, oppressed by the closed windows of tower block apartments… I could not endure the 90 dB intensity of pop music.’ There’s an implicit superiority: if ‘we’ are Dick and her arty mates, ‘they’ are the compliant masses, glued to their televisions.Įach chapter features a new, seemingly interchangeable cast of artists, whose relationships with the ‘unnamed, ungendered’ narrator are indistinct what matters is the different ways they cope in extremis. Therefore, gardening and walking become acts of resistance, and Dick’s lush, transcendent nature writing contrasts with her spare, elliptical dialogue. Although they can’t destroy nature, they can restrict access to it. Details emerge incrementally, so our uncertainty mirrors that of the characters: who exactly are ‘they’?Īre they manning the Orwellian ‘investigation centre’ and ‘compulsory radio programmes’, or are they nearer home -the kitten-maiming children and thuggish ‘sightseers’ sustained by schadenfreude? In fact, they’re everywhere: an inexorable mob, terrifying in its lack of governing intelligence.
They envisions an England at once familiar and foreign, in the grip of a philistine movement which persecutes art and nonconformity. Its subtitle ‘A Sequence of Unease’ aptly expresses its form, which resembles interlinked stories, or a ‘fix-up novel’.
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