It’s often hard to find a dystopian future that doesn’t feel like it’s reworking old ideas. The Forcing is an all too real glimpse into a near future when climate disaster grips the planet. Environmental cataclysm is in no way a new subject for a book, but The Forcing is a chilling and inventive eco-dystopia filled with shocks and surprises.
What Is The Forcing?
In Canada and North America, as the habitable land mass shrinks, a drastic solution has been found to the problem of overcrowding. Everybody over a certain age, those considered responsible for the climate cataclysm, is forced to move to the arid wasteland that has become the southern USA.
David and his wife, May, are just the wrong side of the relocation age. Forced to pack up everything they own into a bag each, they join the queues and board the buses south. Here they are thrown in with a hodgepodge of characters from all walks of life. Their dignity is stripped by the impersonal system and their young guards who hold them in the utmost contempt. Effectively imprisoned in a gulag, David and May have to learn how to navigate their new life, and at the same time deal with the fractures in their marriage that are now laid bare. New friends and alliances are made as they try to survive the cataclysmic events that are coming their way.
The story is told using two narratives both narrated by David or “Teacher” as he is known. The bulk of the novel is told chronologically from the time Teacher announces to his class that he will be leaving. Interspersed throughout the main narrative is another story told by Teacher, toward the end of his life. He talks about his life and describes himself writing his memoirs. The memoirs that we are reading. We know, therefore, that Teacher will survive his tumultuous experience in the camp, but who else will make it out?
Why Read The Forcing?
The Forcing asks us to confront climate change denial, and rather unusually makes the older generation the scapegoats of its dystopian system. It’s a young, idealist government that is trying to change the status quo and save the planet. Yet, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Teacher and May, it turns out, are not making a brave sacrifice for the good of their nation, they are to be persecuted by a regime intoxicated by the power it has been instilled with.
As an older reader (50 very soon) this made for discomfiting reading; the conditions of the camp are brutal. The best dystopian fiction portrays a believable breakdown of society and Hardisty’s is all too realistic. The slide into climate disaster feels uncomfortably plausible. The manner in which the camp’s regime and its guards become sadistic, and the hierarchies formed within the camp’s inmates, will be familiar to anybody who has heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The novel is full of surprises and has some horrific moments. The cast of characters is very well-drawn but their participation in the novel can end abruptly, so beware of becoming too attached to anybody! As the novel progresses, it becomes obvious that a deeper conspiracy is at work. The true nature of the camps slowly becomes clear, and after that, the reasons for the climate disaster begin to have a bearing on the book’s plot. Nothing is what it seems in The Forcing; even the title conceals more than you might think.
I was very impressed with The Forcing. Emotionally, it was never an easy read, exemplifying how horrific humanity’s desperation can be. It also provides a sobering meditation on the nature of power.
The Forcing has many of the hallmarks of 1984, updated and repackaged for the post-internet, social media, billionaire tech-magnate era. It’s a book that brings home the true magnitude of climate disaster written by a leading climate scientist, a man who knows his stuff. For that alone, it would be a scary read, but combine this with its all-too-realistic depictions of abuse of wealth and power and The Forcing becomes a deeply unsettling prediction of the planet’s future.
If you’d like to pick up a copy of The Forcing, you can do so here, in the US, and here, in the UK. (Affiliate Links)
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Disclosure: I received a copy of The Forcing in order to write this review.
