Kallocain

Political dystopias found their form in the first half of the 20th century, with books like Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as the big three. Karin Boye's Kallocain (1940) deserves to be mentioned in the same context. It's certainly at least as good, and its central message - that fear, hatred and paranoia demands a conscious effort, which cannot be sustained forever - certainly more hopeful, as bleak as the novel and its author's untimely end is.

The setting will be familiar to anyone who's read either of the others; a totalitarian state (officially named The World State, even though there are hints that there are other states and occasional wars), "sometime in the 21st century", where the government controls everything. Children are raised by the state and separated from their parents for good when they hit puberty, every aspect of life is rationalised, standardised and specialised with no free will at all, everyone is taught that they exist solely to serve the state, and it goes without saying that the police have spy cameras and microphones everywhere.

Except in people's minds, obviously.

That is, until the chemist Leo Kall stumbles across a new chemical compound, which he names after himself and which proves to be a perfect truth serum. Kallocain works a little like alcohol, he speculates (alcohol, of course, was banned several generations ago); rather than force people to tell the truth, it simply makes them want to stop lying. Shoot them up and they relax, smile and tell you everything that they've been trying to keep hidden. Perfect for convicting criminals, he thinks - except pretty soon it becomes obvious that it can do so much more. Suddenly the state can prosecute people for their thoughts, and Kall is expected to help - but what if it turns out that the worst threat to a totalitarian government isn't a few isolated pockets of convinced political dissidents, but simply people being people, telling stories and listening to music you can't even march to? And what does it mean for his own marriage to a wife he can't help but suspect of being disloyal to him (in itself of course a crime, since they're both supposed to be loyal only to the state)? What is this word "soul" he keeps hearing the suspects mention, which doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all...?

Kallocain clearly owes a lot to Huxley (it predates Orwell's book by several years), but in a way, it's a very different animal. Boye was first and foremost a poet and that sensibility shows in her SF writing even though the narrator Kall is a pretty cold fish at first. She largely stays away from the big political questions; they're there, definitely, and we find out enough about the world Kall lives in to understand it, but the focus is still on personal politics; about what living under constant pressure to be quiet, lie and serve others does to people. It's tempting, of course, to read it not only in a 1940s context - trapped in a world of totalitarian thinking that created both Stalin and Hitler and the people fighting them, and the big war just starting to gather steam - but also in relation to Boye's personal life; as a lesbian, she faced a very real risk of getting thrown in jail simply for existing, and it's quite likely that that pressure led to her suicide a year after Kallocain came out. But even so, 70 years later, there's something in Kallocain that manages to make it positively uplifting. Because what the smiles on the faces of the victims say as they incriminate themselves is "this is not us. We are human beings, we are fucked up and not always good, but as long as it takes a conscious effort to suppress ourselves, we can never be automatons in the long run."

ETA 160625: Det finns en strålande anpassning för radioteater från 1966 på Sveriges Radios sida. Gunnar Björnstrand! Erland Josephson!