My Only Boy by Rosa Rankin-Gee – a dark vision of a dystopia future | Fiction

Rosa Rankin-Gee follows him 2021 near the climate-problem dystopia, Dreamlandit is a similar work but with a political focus. As I read My Only Boy, I kept reminding myself that the world it describes is not (yet) real, because, for readers who live abroad, the England of the book seems to be the closest to what could come. Any political dystopia can be consumed by reality, but in this case the gap between truth and fiction feels claustrophobic.

At the beginning of the novel, Elle is at a party held to mourn that day’s election of a right-wing government. He is the communications manager for Gigr, a company that connects job seekers with the businesses they provide. Elle was just upset about having to testify and immediately put a profile to the person who did the job after jumping off the balcony. They know how to do this, because “we were dying every four weeks, then every three weeks, then every two”: tired, hungry people taking paid shifts from Gigr after working government jobs that no longer pay enough to survive. Almost everyone, in this somewhat difficult, divided and unfair world, ends up working for Gigr sooner rather than later, to buy access to emergency aid or food for a family in crisis, and Gigr has ways to ensure that everyone is paid the minimum wage they can accept.

During this time, the summer is hot and humid, the air and water are dirty, the rain is heavy and irregular. The rich are rich while everyone else’s lives are dirty, brutal and short, and frustration manifests itself in parties and violent outbursts. And Elle, who has been convinced of his homosexuality since he was a teenager, meets Ed, who has just spread the story of gay love to success overnight, and is now a photographer who threatens the human rights of LGBTQ +. They have a sad, sharp, flirtatious conversation about the politics of disillusionment, and Ed invites Elle back to his rented apartment to “put on some Wagner and watch the meteor come in”. In fact, there is the first scene of homosexuality for both, and the beginning of a confusing love affair.

The twin engines of the plot are romance and corruption/government, which is set in stone when Elle begins an affair with her young friend while living with Ed. The intervention poses an important risk in a context where it is clear that things will only get worse. Since Elle is Luisa’s boss and superior, this story makes Elle’s decisions difficult to defend. One of the pleasures of having sex with Luisa is the use, bordering on brutality, of power, Luisa is often so abusive that oral consent is difficult to judge. Although she pays the debt to her elderly, inexperienced parents, Elle finds it difficult not to spend time with them. We see him justifying the most egregious violations of labor and human rights laws, and his nonchalant rhetoric does not redeem it. Rankin-Gee walks a fine line between asking the reader to waste 450 pages with an invisible but understandable, and obnoxious narrator.

Most of the posts are first-person narratives from Elle’s point of view, an important choice because it’s her voice that needs to win and keep the reader’s patience. Mine came to light in the last third, when it started to feel like the dark and funny might end and I didn’t care how the book was asking about the complexities of domestic crime. There are several short sections told in the third person from Ed’s point of view, not only revealing but also interesting as a good way to combine the advantages of the first person point of view with the value of an alternative narrative method.

Everyone in the story is clever, bright and twisted, and the writing delivers the same fun. Ed’s American friend Brad says “I was expecting 1930s Germany but it’s like 1890s Russia” and Elle’s friend Flo, who has a PhD and is (of course) in a relationship with her married manager, replies “This should be great… Elle’s friends and (lovers) all survive on wisecracks, alcohol and threadbare. It makes it funny like a random script, and turns the unexpected last minute move to high heat is not entirely satisfactory.