World Books Review: The Old Maid’s Tale

Ninni Holmqvist’s  speculative novel about the treatment of the elderly is harrowing but implausible.

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy, Other Press, $14.95, 262 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

The use of the term “speculative fiction” as a more respectable sounding synonym for “science fiction” is attributed to Robert Heinlein, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1947. But since then, the two genres have diverged: “science fiction” now describes stories about the future, aliens, and quasi-magical technologies; “speculative fiction” concerns itself with alternate versions of our present reality—dystopias (worlds that suck), anti-utopias (worlds that are supposed to not suck, but actually do suck), and alternate histories.

The greatest exemplars of the latter category don’t test the limits of believability any more than do the greatest literary novels. George Orwell’s 1984 and  Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 use exaggerations of actual historical and cultural phenomena to comment on the present. Because of this, speculative fiction must always be, first and foremost, believable. An implausible character in a novel is easy enough to ignore, but an implausible reality is like a shirt five sizes too small—no matter how elegantly it’s designed, we’re not going to get into it.

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In 1984, it’s the panoptic police state. In Brave New World, the sexualization and Americanization of England. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.

Dorrit Weger, a moderately-successful novelist, begins Homlqvist’s book becoming part of the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty—if single, childless, and without “important” jobs—are sequestered for their final years. The Unit is a glorified retirement community, with restaurants, movie theaters, and indoor gardens. The only catch: all the residents are expected to take part in potentially fatal medical tests, and over the course of five to ten years, donate their vital organs to less “dispensable” people (i.e. those with kids).

It was this term that first signaled to me the weakness of Homqvist’s anti-utopia. Any government sponsored program like the unit would come up with a far more convincing euphemism than “dispensable” for their test subjects: “the selfless” maybe, or “the martyrs.”  And just why would the elderly be desirable organ donors anyway? Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, creates a far more convincing organ farm, where cloned children are bred from birth to be donors (a plot explored with far less subtlety and far more explosions in Michael Bay’s 2005 thriller, The Island).

Ninni Holmqvist -- her nightmare future is scary but but incredible

Not all of the political stuff is as tough to swallow, though the more plausible aspects of it may be unfamiliar to American readers. In a description of all the legislative developments that led to the unit, Dorrit tells us “first of all there was the law stating that parents must divide their parental leave from work equally between them during the child’s first eighteen months.” Many readers won’t know that this is an actual Swedish law (though the “minority” parent, generally the father, is only compelled to rear for two months at present).

Dorrit goes on to explain how this law led to compulsory day care, which then led to the expectation that everyone should have a child, and thus those who didn’t were labeled dispensable. But isn’t compulsory day care the very opposite of paid maternity/paternity leave? And doesn’t that just mean it would be so easy to have a kid that there would be plenty, so it wouldn’t matter if some people chose to be childless? In general, it seemed to me that Holmqvist was less concerned with creating a plausible reality than with making a philosophical point.

“I’ve never understood the point of winning just for the sake of winning,” one of Dorrit’s friends tells her early in the novel. “What’s the point in putting all your energy into being better than other people at just one thing, which is in fact completely irrelevant?” The Unit is a polemic against the world’s strivers, filling the world with their children and waste and infuriating presence. Dorrit mourns for her lost relationships with her sister and her dog, for her many novels which didn’t make her famous but brought her joy. Her very happiness in lonely dotage becomes the question at the heart of The Unit: how does one define a successful life?

When she meets a man in the unit, falls in love, and manages to become pregnant, the question becomes less academic. Holmqvist skillfully steers the novel away from a simple escape thriller, but the anti-utopia begins to fall apart at the seams. If Dorrit had a baby, she would no longer be “dispensable,” so why isn’t she allowed to keep the child and leave the unit? And why doesn’t she anyway? The answer is that it wouldn’t serve the plot, which ends with an unconvincing repudiation of Dorrit’s rebellious nature.

Holmqvist raises provocative issues, and Dorrit is a pleasant guide down the thorny philosophical slalom. Unfortunately, inconsistencies and implausibilities keep the novel from joining other classics of anti-utopian literature. It’s always fun to speculate, but somewhere along the line, The Unit leaves both speculative and science fiction behind, and enters the realm of fantasy.

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