The problem with me and dystopic novels is that I can’t ever quite shake them off as “something that would never happen”. The level to which people become complacent, so long as they are well-fed and unruffled, un-nerves me (never more so than when I recognize it in myself). It’s really easy to pick on the white picket fence suburban dwelling home-owners to illustrate this point, but we’re all doing it: those that live in glamorous high-rises in Manhattan with loads of money and important, morally-bankrupt jobs, and those working on a farm taking government money to grow way too much corn. As long as the status-quo is maintained, we stay quiet, and chains can easily slip around us.

Anyway, I was sent a dystopic novel to review and I couldn’t talk about it for a while even though it was really, really good; it shook me up a bit. Then we moved, and and it got backburnered, but I’m pretty excited to share this one now. It’s kind of like the Giver meets Soylent Green.

The Unitby Ninni Holmqvist is set in the not so distant future, in Sweden. The people in society known as “dispensables” are sent to live in the Second Reserve Unit Bank where they are given comfortable one-bedroom apartments sealed in a huge facility that provides them everything they need to live out their last days rather luxuriously: swimming pools, a library, five-course meals, a museum, and fun social events are all provided at no cost to them. In the heart of the Unit is a winter garden perpetually blooming with flowers that becomes the favorite hangout of Dorrit Weger, the narrator, who was sent to live in the Unit shortly after her 50th birthday. (In a sexist plot twist we learn that one becomes a dispensable by failing to have children, contributing to the economy or being registered as “loved” by family or a lover by age 50 for women, while men have until age 60.)

In exchange for all of this, the dispensables are used for involuntary drug and scientific experiments, and donate organs, one at a time for a few years, to those outside the Unit who are “needed” by society. Eventually the time comes for all of them to give their “final donation”.

In striking contrast to a lot of dystopic stories, everyone in the Unit is completely aware of what is happening to them. Rather than be horrified, it is accepted simply as The Way Things Are.  Most  of the inhabitants are more focused on enjoying the close friendships and sense of belonging they’ve found in the Unit for the first time in their lives, and who is going to be donating what is a frequent topic of glib dinner conversation: “Next week, they’re giving my kidney to a mother of four!”

It sounds completely horrific, but the book is written so cleverly and in such a way that Ninni brings us to the point where even the most fundamentalist theist would start to think, “Ok, maybe…?”, and THEN she hits us with a plot twist so unexpected I literally said out loud, “SHUT! UP!” and dropped the book in shock (which was awkward because I was on the subway).

By the end of the novel it’s quite clear that this system has created a sort of hell outside of the Unit, with teens having babies as young as possible to ensure they won’t end up in the Unit, and kidnappings skyrocketing among those whose time is coming to go. Standards for dispensables change to become broader, so they can include more of the people who were formerly protected.

Despite the heavy topic this is an easy read, making it a good, cerebral alternative to the fluffy chick-lit beach books available to us women. It is an inspection of what it is to be a thinking female, a critical look at rampant ageism, and an examination of the struggle to find a worthwhile identity in society as an un-married, non-childbearing woman. In other words, it’s a look at a caricature of a society not entirely unlike our own.

To buy it: