But what does that do to a society? And if no-one’s even voting anymore, who’s running the show? This is a late capitalist, post-Brexit, post-Trump world that is uncomfortably close to home. You can easily imagine a world where given the choice between keeping your vote and keeping your washing machine, most people will choose the latter.
The protagonist and her best friend seem to want to stay out of politics.
Die Zeit described it as a political pamphlet disguised as a thriller, and that certainly fits the bill. I suppose you could even read the poem as a sort of dystopian political thriller.īecause that is what Leere Herzen is. I’d forgotten that Braunschweig is Brunswick in English, but as soon as I remembered, the Pied Piper of Hamelin echoed in my head: “Hamelin town’s in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city…” That makes sense, as being led astray is a big part of both stories. A bit like Black Mirror, perhaps.īut the location of this book couldn’t really be anywhere else but Germany, and a decent-sized city in Northern Germany at that. (Aug.The year is not that far into the future, near enough that it could almost be now, but far away enough that it really couldn’t, at least one hopes not. Not every detail rings true, but Zeh makes it easy to suspend disbelief in this cold-blooded and macabre future.
Britta’s search for an explanation will keep readers turning the pages. After a failed terror attack on an airport, carried out by would-be suicide bombers who weren’t identified by the never-wrong Lassie, Britta fears a rival entity might be responsible.
She invites those identified as candidates to her business, the Bridge, which ostensibly provides “healing therapy for suicide prevention.” Most are dissuaded from self-harm, and Britta links the others with organizations looking to deploy them in suicide missions for a fee paid to the Bridge and the participants’ survivors. Britta Söldner has come up with an innovative algorithm to capitalize on the increased depression these events have caused: Lassie, which uses data mining to search the internet for people considering suicide. In this intriguing near-future dystopian thriller from Zeh ( Compression), Germany, now ruled by populists, has implemented massive budget cuts France has left the EU and there’s a global financial crisis.
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