Within

LoveReading Says

Wildly inventive, Alan Rhode’s Within blends big-picture dystopian dilemmas with intensely personal, impossible conundrums as the curtain is pulled on everything its protagonist has ever known.

Rhode wastes no time in thrusting readers into the core of his story universe - a stark, dark world in which humanity has been banished to exist in blacked-out corridors as a result of Earth being scorched by the sun, or so the governing Tenets would have the population believe. Life in such circumstances means being fed nutrients through a hatch in the wall of your unit. It means keeping the perimeters of this strange new world covered in black. As Boz explains, “Black is meant to remind all of us of what Sun did, the Crier said, and we all have therefore to contribute to the perpetual painting of the perimeter”, though he privately suspects this work is meaningless.

Living here, in a place that’s also hideously racist, as revealed when Boz is tasked with cleaning the cage of a “Congoid” woman, also means singing hymns about how they were betrayed by the sun: “Sun burned all forms of life outside these walls. The Land of Without is empty, barren”. But all that changes when Boz encounters a disfigured man who reveals earth-shattering truths, and then falls for Flox, a young woman who’s experienced the unimaginable. Might it be true that another world still exists beyond the tightly-controlled realm ruled by the Tenets? Is the Land of Without really barren?

Juxtaposing love and justice as it explores control and compliance through fear versus curiosity and the compulsion for freedom, Within is a feverish frenzy of dystopian fiction.

Joanne Owen

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