50 pages • 1 hour read
John LanchesterThe Wall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Wall”
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Joseph dreads going home. Relationships between people of Joseph’s generation and their parents are strained because the “olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it” (53). Even worse, the older generation is excused from serving on the Wall because of their age. Their children do the service for them, a situation that strikes Joseph as unfair. Some people feel nostalgia for what life was like before the Change. The beaches of the world drowned or crumbled with the sea level rose, but there are still people who collect memorabilia or watch media with a beach setting. Joseph’s parents are in this group. They wait until he leaves to watch a surfing movie.
Relations with old school friends aren’t any better. The only thing to talk about is the Wall. Talking to these friends in the pub, Joseph realizes the Captain is among the strictest company leaders. Joseph begins to take pride in being in a company like that. The other people in the pub avoid the Defenders. The risk of death is so high that Defenders have little to lose in a fight with a civilian.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Joseph sees the first concrete trace of the Others one night when a boat flashes its lights out at sea. Seeing the lights causes him to think about the fear he and the Others have in common. The difference between them is the Wall, which Joseph imagines must seem “like a terrible thing from the sea, a flat malevolent line like a scar. So blank, so remorseless, so implacable” (64). Defenders must seem “more like devils than human beings. Spirits, embodied essences, of pure malignity” (64). Better them than him, Joseph concludes. He can’t allow himself to feel any sense of responsibility for them. Meeting them face to face means killing them or dying.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
On the next leave, Joseph and his peers go camping. They don’t have any money, but as Defenders they do have access to food and the labor of Help. Joseph learns more about his peers. He tries to get Hifa alone so they can kiss or have sex, but she keeps avoiding being alone with him. When they finally do go on a walk, she confesses she would like to have Help. Joseph wishes the same thing but would never confess it. Hughes does Tai chi in the morning, something he would never do on the Wall because of the cold and because his fellow Defenders might ridicule him. Hughes wants to go to university, study Romantic poetry, and become a professor. That dream is as far from life as a Defender as one can get.
Joseph has a secret dream, which is to be one of the elites he imagines looking down on ordinary people like him from an airplane. He doesn’t share that dream because he is afraid people will think that he thinks he is better than the other Defenders. The longer time he spends with his unit, the more he loves them, even if he doesn’t want to remain one of them once his tour is done. At the time, Joseph thinks that the way people act away from the Wall is closer to their true identities; looking back, he suspects that identity is a matter of context.
The luxury of being waited on hand and foot gives Joseph a taste of what it must be like to be an elite. The food the Help cooks is delicious. Mary, the Defender cook, hovers over and insults the man cooking for them with her unsolicited suggestions. The man can’t tell her to leave because he is Help, and the two eventually share cooking tips. Remembering when produce from all over the world was readily available, Mary concludes that life before the Wall was something like “science fiction.” Joseph is also intrigued by the Help. Curious about who they are, Joseph gives one of the Help a tip and asks what people where he comes from call the Change. They call it “Kuishia,” a Swahili word that “means ‘the ending’” (79).
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Joseph and the other Defenders go straight from leave to a training installation inland. The installation is on an old section of the Wall that runs along a riverbank. As the sea levels rose, the United Kingdom had to build further out. This place is green, beautiful, and has a riverbank that slopes down, making it far different from the coasts, which are now sheer drops. The training exercise is one in which the company is split into two. Each side gets a chance to play Defenders and Others.
On the first turn, Joseph’s group plays the Defenders. The group of “Others” overwhelms Joseph’s group because they are allowed to hide along the Wall, something that would be unlikely to happen in real life since the approach to the Wall is from the sea. This is cheating, Joseph thinks.
Joseph is initially upset at not winning, but he lets it go when the next shift comes on to assume the role of Defenders. The Wall, the difference between Others and Defenders, living and dying, is all arbitrary and down to luck, Joseph realizes. The whimsy of the rules of the exercise makes Joseph feel ambivalent about being a Defender.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
The Captain discusses what went wrong with Joseph’s team when they played the Defenders. He emphasizes that there is nothing fair about what happened, but that may be true on the day the Others meet them at the Wall in reality. Only three out of the 15 members of Joseph’s team survived the attack. In reality, if many Others breached the Wall, everyone involved, from leadership on down, would be put out to sea.
Hifa is still angry about having been one of those killed during the exercise, but takes some comfort when the Captain tells her their team will get an advantage when it’s their turn to be Others. Joseph tells her the exercise is like a game or a story, and the two tell a story together about a child-eating ogre living in a sham castle.
When the Captain organizes them for their turn at being Others, he seems excited by their plan, which involves engaging in multiple small assaults to distract from the big assault, which will begin with a power cut that puts the Defender side in darkness. The plan works perfectly, but the Captain has resumed his usual stoic demeanor.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
The company celebrates the end of the training with a party and hard drinking. The next morning, the hung-over unit is forced to listen as James, an inexperienced politician, gives them a lecture that is part pep-talk and part warning. He praises them using platitudes that make more than one Defender roll their eyes. Joseph feels envy and disgust as he watches the politician. James is an elite, and the rumor is that elites get out of serving as Defenders by getting education deferments or forcing Others they’ve diverted from Help status to serve in their place.
James has no credibility with the company. He eventually gets their attention when he tells them something new: The number of Others will increase, and they will be desperate because the Change is accelerating. It is coming to the United Kingdom with more climate change effects. The Defenders have heroically defended the nation from Others so far, but now their enemies will include citizens who think there is something wrong with keeping the Others out. They are collaborators who are working to help Others enter the country and get the chips they need to escape detection. These people are naïve at best and wicked traitors at worst. It is the job of Defenders to be ready to fight against both the Others and these traitors. That effort may require longer, more dangerous service, but James is confident the Defenders are ready for it.
Joseph thinks James is deluded. No Defender cares if Others can hide using identity chips or if citizens are helping them. Once the Others get into the country, the Defenders responsible are either dead or have been put out to sea.
Part 1, Chapters 7-12 Analysis
Wall uses these chapters to show that the cost of building and defending the Wall is alienation on all levels of society. Wall contrasts inland life and life on the Wall to represent this alienation.
Joseph is alienated from his parents because they are part of the generation that allowed climate change to happen. He sees them as contemptible people who are stuck in the past. Lanchester illustrates their nostalgia with the surfing film they watch after Joseph departs. Engaging with the film allows them to escape the reality of their current situation, including the impact of life on the Wall on their only child.
Joseph is also alienated from peers his age. At home, the Wall consumes all conversation with his friends, leaving Joseph feeling unsatisfied and empty after he meets up with them. It takes going inland for Joseph tor realize how defending the Wall drives this alienation. Camping with Hughes allows Joseph to see another dimension of his cohorts. Hughes performs Tai chi, a practice that grounds him in the present by encouraging mindfulness; he is also future-facing because he has plans for life after the Wall. Hughes serves as a foil, or a character who illustrates another character’s traits through contrasting qualities: His attention to the present and future encourages Joseph to reflect on his own present and future.
Joseph’s pursuit of Hifa leaves him profoundly unsatisfied and disconnected. Hifa is more transparent about her dreams, while Joseph is more guarded. His secret desires and ambitions are ones he cannot bring himself to share with her and the other Defenders because the Wall creates a context in which intimacy is dangerous. It may distract one from the present, which is surviving in an atmosphere where death is imminent.
Joseph is also alienated from the elites responsible for the system that sustains the Wall. James is the only elite Joseph has observed closely. James’s speech helps Joseph understand that elites have no clue about the reality of life on the Wall and what motivates Defenders to do their duty. It isn’t patriotism. Joseph and the other Defenders find James’s appeals to love of country ridiculous, and Joseph feels a milder contempt for the civilian pub customers who avoid Defenders for fear of conflict. Joseph suspects that what motivates elites like James is self-interest, as Joseph himself is motivated by self-interest. When Joseph imagines himself in the future, he is a man who flies above his peers on an airplane, a symbol of the elites’ alienation from ordinary people.
Joseph is most profoundly alienated from the Others. His interactions with them underscore the degree to which living on and inside the Wall makes one complicit in an exploitative system created by the United Kingdom’s response to climate change. Joseph occasionally allows himself to think about the ethical implications of the Wall as a temporary stay against chaos, as when he imagines that Others must see people like him as “devils” (64).
That moment of insight is brief, however. Joseph immediately reverts to thinking like a Defender, who simply sees Others as the enemy. The rewards of ignoring the ethics of the Wall are too great to resist. The camping trip is a kind of dress rehearsal for what life will be like as an elite, and Joseph is proud when he figures out how to leverage his status as Defender to get the labor of Others for no monetary cost. Joseph tries to assuage his guilt over reliance on this labor by giving the Other cook a tip; but even then, he uses the tip to extract information from the cook when asking what Others call the effects of climate change.
The cook’s response that they call it the ending (“Kuishia”) becomes even more ominous when James gives a speech reminding them that the Change is a series of cascading climate effects rather than a singular event outside of the Wall’s protection. The cook’s response and James’s speech foreshadow disaster. They also illustrate how even Defenders on the Wall are engaged in a willful blindness, and how they ignore that the United Kingdom’s efforts to insulate itself from the world are unsustainable.
