The Arrest by Jonathan LethemMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What do you do with the undesirable parts of your past when they pop up in your present? In this interesting speculative fiction tale, Lethem sets his tale in a world where technology - primarily anything electronic and guns - has stopped working, but life goes on. In Journeyman/Sandy's case, life goes on in the seaside, organic gardening community of East Tinderwick, where he was visiting his sister Maddie when "The Arrest" occurred, leaving him stranded from his screenwriter life back in LA. Their community lives in a state of uneasy equilibrium with the members of the Cordon, a group of rough-riding people who serve as protection from... whatever is going on in the wider world. The Cordon, with their horses and shit-fueled motorcycles, provide protection in exchange for sustenance from the seaside community's farms. The equilibrium is threatened when a character from Sandy's LA life - his old screenwriting buddy turned producer, Peter Todbaum - shows up in a nuclear-powered supermobile.
The story is told simply and nothing much really happens until the end, but even then, Lethem's tale feels more like a fable than a stereotypical dystopian novel. I enjoyed it. The prose is well written, the characters are interesting, and I didn't really mind that some issues that would seem key in other books (what happened between Maddie and Todbaum? where did Todbaum really get his supercar? what is actually going on out in the wider world?) really don't matter. What matters is what's going on in Sandy's head, and that's interesting enough.
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