Disnaeland by D.D. Johnston
(Barbican Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
The late American comedian George Carlin once joked, “The planet is fine…the people are fucked!” When we speak of the end of the world, then, what we most often mean is the end of civilisation. It is of course a dangerously freighted word, carrying as it does a wide load of assumptions, prejudices and sins. This is the tension at the heart of D.D. Johnston’s Disnaeland, a novel narrated in an Anglicised version of the Scots dialect that focuses on the central Scottish town of Dundule in 2023—the year in which, in the alternative reality of this novel (and which, according to the author, is “just as real as our own”), the world ends.
Johnston is not a science fiction writer—his second novel, the cracked historical fiction of The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub (2013), was shortlisted for the hyper-literary Goldsmiths Prize—but there is much here that a reader of the genre would recognise. Its frame narrative—in which Johnston claims to have received the whole of the novel’s story in a series of visions he refers to as a prophesy—is not so dissimilar to that of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937); the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary circumstances will remind many of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre, and in particular his Science in the Capital series (2004-2007); and the book’s own PR material makes explicit the link between Disnaeland and the work of Alasdair Gray, in particular Lanark (1981), which similarly weirded a Scottish landscape in quasi-dystopian ways.
In truth, though, Johnston is more interested in the radical political potential of his science fictional set-up than he is in its deeper generic elements. The apocalypses he works against are popular—The Road (2009), The Walking Dead (2010-2022), Children of Men (2006)—in which humans usually revert to a despairing, brutalising state immediately and without return. One of Disnaeland’s key antagonists is rather archly given the name of Hobbes, in reference of course to the seventeenth-century philosopher who posited an absolute monarch as the necessary protector of otherwise savage and ungovernable charges. But the brute survivalism of the Hobbes of Disnaeland is seen not to offer the only solution for a polis but to force a zero-sum frame of “the war of every fucker against every ither fucker” onto a populace in fact naturally inclined towards anarcho-communism.
The novel begins with a total power outage which is never explained by the author nor in any way addressed by the authorities (“they’re gaunae turn Scotland intae a theme park and they’re gaunae call it Disnaeland […] cause it disnae vote for them, it disnae like them, and it disnae F-ing matter”). At first, Johnston’s characters—the single mother Donna, the chip-shop proprietor Giorgio, the local university lecturer Ruth—struggle to cope. As time goes by, however, they and their communities slowly coalesce into new, problem-solving shapes. Even the wickedly satirical local landowner, Lord Slabberford of Spittle, proves ultimately to be a part of the wider body of this new society. Hobbes—Thomas, not his absurd survivalist namesake—is thus found to have been wrong: the natural state of man is not nasty, brutish and short; it is co-operative, peaceful and sustainable.
Johnston perhaps considers this a more revolutionary approach to the apocalypse than it in fact is. Quite aside from the tradition of the cosy catastrophe of which John Wyndham was the master, in the last few decades much science fiction has approached the apocalypse with communalist hope: Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and even Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) have all, alongside many others, sought to understand how people might rebuild from a civilisation-ending event. The attentive reader will note that all these authors are women, while all the previous comparators in this review were men. There is indeed something a little male about how Disnaeland—often funny, frequently wise, always compellingly written—ends, literally stops in a final two paragraphs, in sudden conflagration. Perhaps the novel is telling us that, once we have given power to Leviathan, we can never escape its destructive force; or perhaps Johnston himself cannot quite imagine how even his anarcho-communists can make it further than two hundred days once the walls fall. We should acknowledge that this is a literary novel, not a purely science fictional one—and that it uses the tools of SF better than most similar works. Disnaeland is as much a working-class paen, a Ten Storey Love Song (2009), for the generation of Extinction Rebellion as it is a lurid The Stand (1978) for the LRB set. In this it proves a potent concoction, a heartfelt and humane novel of the end of everything. Civilisation and the world may well be not quite the same; but they can certainly feel like it.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.