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A review by alicechris
News from Nowhere by William Morris
2.5
This is a really weird book that I wanted to like but ended up feeling just sort of average about. I love Morris's designs and had a vague idea he'd done some communist writing, and then found this by chance. After reading a lot of dystopia last year (Parable of the Sower + Talents) I was excited to try a utopian novel.
I don't want to be too critical because the book is a product of its time, and some of it did really resonate with me - finding meaning in crafts and nature, and a vision of England (although nations don't seem to exist anymore) as a 'garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt'. Although some changes in this future seem very personal (Morris didn't like Manchester and so it ceased to exist), his vision of what a city could be will stick with me, and feels really relevant to current environmentalism (especially as someone who wrote a dissertation on urban green space).
It because clear pretty quickly there isn't a place for me in Morris's utopia - women are mostly housekeepers (at one point Morris talks about the emancipation of women as being pointless...) and there are so many descriptions of women as being more attractive in the future. Morris's self-insert also has a creepy romance with a 20 year old (he is in his fifties, and you can kind of infer he has a wife and kids). Health problems will apparently all disappear under communism too, can't wait!
I find Morris's backwards looking communism intriguing - at some points he seems to fall into the Victorian myth of a previous golden era of democracy (or in this case communism I guess) ended by the Norman conquest, and so his ideals feel less about potential, and so less radical, than they could do. This probably also explains a thread of what I'm calling 'Thames Valley patriotism' in the book.
On its own terms, this book is pretty good, but I do feel I've lost some respect for Morris now unfortunately. One of the good things about reading someone else's utopia is it's helped me sharpen what my own might be, and reminded me of Octavia E. Butler's 'The Book of Martha' - no one is going to be satisfied by anyone else's ideal world, so it's not surprising that Morris's pitch didn't totally win me over.
I don't want to be too critical because the book is a product of its time, and some of it did really resonate with me - finding meaning in crafts and nature, and a vision of England (although nations don't seem to exist anymore) as a 'garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt'. Although some changes in this future seem very personal (Morris didn't like Manchester and so it ceased to exist), his vision of what a city could be will stick with me, and feels really relevant to current environmentalism (especially as someone who wrote a dissertation on urban green space).
It because clear pretty quickly there isn't a place for me in Morris's utopia - women are mostly housekeepers (at one point Morris talks about the emancipation of women as being pointless...) and there are so many descriptions of women as being more attractive in the future. Morris's self-insert also has a creepy romance with a 20 year old (he is in his fifties, and you can kind of infer he has a wife and kids). Health problems will apparently all disappear under communism too, can't wait!
I find Morris's backwards looking communism intriguing - at some points he seems to fall into the Victorian myth of a previous golden era of democracy (or in this case communism I guess) ended by the Norman conquest, and so his ideals feel less about potential, and so less radical, than they could do. This probably also explains a thread of what I'm calling 'Thames Valley patriotism' in the book.
On its own terms, this book is pretty good, but I do feel I've lost some respect for Morris now unfortunately. One of the good things about reading someone else's utopia is it's helped me sharpen what my own might be, and reminded me of Octavia E. Butler's 'The Book of Martha' - no one is going to be satisfied by anyone else's ideal world, so it's not surprising that Morris's pitch didn't totally win me over.