This isn’t strictly a book review but I feel compelled to
about this book, SmartYellow by J. A. Christy. [contains mild spoilers]
This book has been haunting me
since I finished reading it over a month ago. Book hangovers aren’t uncommon
but the extent to which this has got in to my brain is something different and
I feel compelled to explore this further. As much as this explores the book
this post is a commentary on the current welfare state in the UK.
I’m not unaccustomed to enjoying books that can best be
described as “a bit grim”: dystopian AUs and contemporary noir are my jam. SmartYellow
definitely fits in to that category.
A brief synopsis: SmartYellow is set in a recognisable Britain, the part of
Britain that never really makes it in to books or on TV. SmartYellow is
primarily set in a council estate. It follows the life and struggles of a
single mother who find herself far out of her middle class comfort zone and
struggling to survive on a notorious estate. When an Olive branch is offered to
her she takes it and does her best to make the best out of what is increasingly
clear to be and terrible situation. Getting to grips with government
surveillance and finding out that her tasks are part of something far deeper
and more sinister than she first thought.
The science of SmartYellow is subtle and not described in
great detail only alluded to in layman’s terms. The source and real power of
the technology isn’t explored in depth rather focussing on the impact of how it
is used in the real world. It isn’t a lot but it is just enough to push
SmartYellow in to the realms of sci-fi and an uncanny valley alternative
universe where control of “undesirables” is far more insidious than we would
like to believe.
This is a book about choices. It is about hard decisions and
what you do when you are caught between a rock and hard place. It’s about Us
and Them, our prejudices, our boundaries and how far we will go to save
ourselves. And it is brutal.
Perhaps you are starting to get an inkling of why this book
affected me so deeply. To start with the setting is meticulously describes and
painfully familiar to many of us. An ordinary unassuming town it has its posh
bits, its comfortable middle class suburbs, a bustling centre, some working
class streets and then, pushed to one side, the council estates. Run down
clusters of maisonettes and blocks of flats segregated from the rest of the
city. The people who live there are marked as different. They are outcasts from
the town. They are considered by everybody off the estates to have failed in
some way, to be lesser, to be beyond help and in some cases deserving of all
that they have to suffer.
J. A. Christy’s
descriptions are raw, clear and without shame. You feel every ounce of the grey
and pastel prison that surrounds you. You feel the fear and desperation. What
Christy has done is make us face head on and eye to eye the reality of these
estates and how some people are cut off from society. It’s a difficult lesson
if you’ve never been forced to think about it and for those who have had to
think about it, have experienced it or come close its painful reminder.
Outside of the book this country has a problem with poverty
and with the working poor. Though we have a benefit system it is clear to
almost everybody that it is brutally unfair and often sets people up to fail.
You have to be able to apply in the first place, you have to be able to jump
through hoops of bureaucracy to even be accepted and in many cases you then
have to continue with these circus trips to attend meeting, fill our form after
form and behave in a way which is defined by an anonymous body. This would be
difficult for people even in ideal circumstances, but in reality most of the
people who have to apply are far from in ideal circumstances. They are already
poor, already struggling. They often have substance abuse to deal with. Many
come from abusive and broken homes and do not have a support network around
them. Some of us are ill and disabled. Others have young children or family
members who need care. Often there is a lack of education or literacy that
holds people back. But there is no support. All are expected to jump through
the hoops and perform the arcane rights necessary to get enough money that they
can eat but that keeps them firmly under the poverty line.
Some of us are lucky, we find ourselves in these situations
after we have had a chance to thrive. I cannot work and apply for PIP but I am
“lucky” in that I have a support network of good people around me who can and
will help. I am “lucky” in that I have a middleclass-ish background and have
that to draw from. I am “lucky” in that I had the time and means to go to
school, do my A-levels and go to university. It makes it easier. Not so easy
that I don’t end up in tears and have panic attacks having to deal with the
DWP. Not so easy that I can live comfortably and don’t have to worry about
money. Not so easy that there haven’t been periods where I would eat less and
less so my money would stretch further, that I would lower the thermostat to
14.5 degrees in the winter and just pile on sweaters and scarves to keep warm
to save precious energy. But I am still, relatively speaking lucky.
One such element of my “luck” is that I have never had to
apply for social housing. Because with that instantly comes stigma. It
shouldn’t do. So many people find themselves in a situation where finding a
house to rent with their budget is impossible as private landlords buy up home
after home and inflate prices. As old buildings are refurbished into “luxury
apartments” that house only a few but charge more than many can afford. As
inflation and house prices push more and more people into previously
undesirable neighbourhoods and who can afford to rent and buy when the people
who already live there can’t and have to move out. Social housing is important.
It helps people: people who are working full time on minimum wage; families
with dependants who struggle to make ends meet; single parent families;
disabled adults. They all need somewhere they can call home and they can live
safely without fear of becoming homeless or anything else bad happening to
them.
However, instead of seeing council housing and council
estates as good places for people who need them, in our society council estates
and other social housing is maligned. They are treated as the place where the
lesser dregs of society are swept off to fester. The stigma is such that even
ex-council estates, those which have been bought up in the right-to-buy rush of
the 80s and early 90s and are now largely privately owned or privately rented,
are scorned, have less market value, are avoided, treated as trouble spots, and
bad areas. Sometimes of course they are. I can’t deny that places like The
Noctorum estate on the Wirral were violent and rife with crime. When I said I
was moving to the satellite town I now live in people sucked in their breath
and warned me away from an estate that had a history of crime ranging from gang
fights to burglary. There is often the question though of do these places have
these problems because the residents are in need of social housing, or do these
things happen because of how broader society treats the people who live there.
Perhaps it’s a bit of both. The language used is telling and
difficult. Them versus us. Them and not me. They are other. These are the
struggles and difficulties that Christy picks up on wonderfully in SmartYellow
and she uses the language of They and Us to great effect putting up barriers
both metaphorical and more sinister between the in group, the safe space of The
Town, and the out group, the squalor and fear of the estate. This is the first
way that this book grips you and gets under your skin: the uncomfortable notion
that quite probably you can’t help yourself from thinking in terms of us and
them; that try as you might you have placed yourself in “us” and talked about “them”.
Even if your words have been compassionate there is always the barrier. The
realisation or recognition that we are a part of this horrible dystopia that we
are reading about is sickening but difficult to pull away from, because now you
aren’t reading a story, you are reading something that is achingly familiar and
a part of your own world.
This dichotomy between “us” and “them” is a repeated motif
throughout the book and something you can’t escape from. It forces you to
examine your own prejudice and your own feelings on the subject again and again
from every perspective asking yourself “who am I?” and “where do I draw my
line?”. It is a brutal test of your own ethics and morality.
I had a further struggle reading this, a struggle that is far
more personal and that not every reader may come up against. I am on benefits.
I am on (well sort of I’m in the middle of the appeals process) PIP. Previously
I was on DSL and ESA[i]
and in receipt of housing benefit. I was with a private landlord but my housing
was supported by local government. I was one of them. I am one of them. As I
described above, I have felt many of the associated struggled. Furthermore I
can’t work due to disability. At least not any sort of regular work that is
valued and recognised as employment by our government or vast swathes of our
country. I am not seen to contribute value. I am not productive. I am a dead weight
who does not contribute. I am a burden on society. This is a rhetoric I can
barely escape as it appears in new stories, parliamentary debates, TV chat
shows and overheard snippets of general conversation on a nearly daily basis.
The paperwork I endure to be allowed a meagre sum that amounts to £3.03 a day
is full of questions and statements meant to remind me and test that I really
deserve. I have literally been judged, and judged negatively I may add, for
being “well presented”. I must perform a pantomime that shows that I am in
desperate need but also that I am grateful and trying hard enough. I must be
perky happy and wanting, but also in difficulties to the point of no basic
hygiene. I am supposed to stay within an ill-fitting cage that I may be
rewarded with my £3 a day. Do too well and your money is stopped. Save up a
little, just enough to feel safe, and your money is stopped. Manage to find a few
hours irregular work, far from a manner able to support yourself and your money
is stopped. Fail to attend a meeting because you are sick, starving or,
god-forbid have a job interview and your support is taken away.
My situation may be more comfortable than the life of the
central characters of SmartYellow but I am far, far too conscious of the
constant scrutiny from those who have control. So a world that is crafted to
have even more control, more surveillance, to subtly infiltrate your lives and
not only make sure you are playing by the rules that allow you to eat but also
making sure you never stray from your allotted place is all to easy to believe.
The advanced technology of SmartYellow may not exist
(probably) but that does not mean we can’t imagine more mundane methods for
creating Zones and ensuring that people stay in their place. We already know
that it is more difficult for people with a social housing address to get a
job, for those who are out of work for long periods to find employment. We know
that people with prison records, no credit and disrupted housing continue to
struggle for employment, housing and even healthcare as people judge and weigh
the elements of a person’s past. It’s not so hard to imagine that there may be
a list of blacklisted addresses and postcodes hanging in an HR office or
letting agency. It’s not hard to imagine that police respond differently to
calls made in certain areas. It’s not out of the realms of possibly that on
some desk in some forgotten about council office there are a series of maps
with lurid yellow lines traced around the boundaries of the areas where They
live. We can’t pretend, also that eugenics has never been discussed and
researched[ii][iii],
even carried out in places as a method of population control for those deemed
undesirable[iv].
I finished reading the book with a sense of acute paranoia.
I knew intellectually that the scenario created by Christy was, though based in
reality, fiction. I knew it was speculation and not fact. And yet, the very
real sense of always being judged by some governing body or other was inflamed
and made a magnitude worse. If they are treating us like this now, think what
else they can do if the technology and opportunity ever arises? What of failed
experiments and pilot schemes? Would we ever actually be told about them? What
if the eugenicists never went away? What if things really are getting worse. Will
I be able to satisfy the criteria that keep me from being labelled an “undesirable”?
Really do I want to be on that side of the divide? How do I see myself, who am
I and how do they see me?
So many questions and so few answers, at last none that I
was satisfied with.
The real thing that left me shaken and melancholy from
reading SmartYellow was a real, deep and darkly certain feeling not that this
could happen, but that it already is happening.
Christy created world where choice is everything, where lack
of choice and desperation is what sets us apart. A world where we can shut up
and accept the status quo, fight for the scraps we have and be satisfied or
push against them and risk losing it all. Is that not the world we live in?
I desperately want to recommend this book to people but it
comes with a warning: it might leave you feeling like shit.
[i]
PIP (Personal Independence Payment), DSA (Disability Support Allowance) and ESA
(Employment Support Allowance) are all UK benefits/social security. PIP is
being introduced to replace DSA. It is administered by the DWP – The Department
of Work and Pensions, which is a department of the UK Government.
[ii] For
example Lee Kwan Yeu in the 1960s http://www.blynkt.com/issue-1/eugenics-in-postcolonial-singapore,
[iii]
Exceprt from Richard Dawkins http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12760676.From_the_Afterword/
[iv] Short
article detailing some of the forced sterilisation and euthanasia of “undesirables”
in the USAnhttp://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php
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