Reviews with content warning for Alcoholism - Enclave

Reviews tagging 'Alcoholism'

sophiesmallhands's review

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

incrediblemelk's review

Go to review page

adventurous challenging hopeful inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is the third of Coleman's novels I’ve read and I enjoyed it a lot, but it’s the softest and most hopeful of Coleman’s three novels, which meant that I enjoyed it as escapism but its political critique doesn’t have the same bite as her previous work and doesn’t challenge the reader’s genre expectations as much.

I really enjoy her style of writing – at times gripping, direct and propulsive, at times vividly lyrical, full of run-on sentences – which harnesses the genre styles and tropes of science fiction to commentate on contemporary Australian political issues.

This was compared to The Handmaid's Tale a lot, which is a pretty lazy comparison. To be honest I think that story has become so well known as to blunt its political critique. There are so many similar stories, from John Wyndham's Chrysalids on, riffed on so many times – especially in dystopian young adult fiction, which genre Coleman is specifically tapping here. Obviously when we're introduced to Christine's oppressive life we understand immediately, long before she does, that she's being imprisoned in her walled city rather than protected from the horrors outside, and that she will escape and thrive once she leaves it. (I don't really think that's a spoiler.)

Conversely, Coleman's descriptions of a still-possible utopian future Melbourne surprised me with how tender they made me feel. They had me yearning for what my home city could be, even as I fatalistically accept that it won't ever come to pass: the world of the enclave is our real world and we can't escape it as Christine does, because our world has no containing wall, no boundary outside which something better can grow. Am I in the grip of Mark Fisher's "capitalist realism" – the feeling that no alternative to capitalism is even possible, even if it's conceivable?

Content Warnings