Anita Mason - The War Against Chaos

The War Against Chaos is set in a dystopian version of Britain that is similar in its depiction of a grey, shabby, philistine country, to Orwell’s 1984. The principal character Hare, is a clerk for a vast conglomerate known as Universal Goods, who is dismissed from his job and his lodgings after his corrupt boss, Jacobs, manipulates evidence against him. After sleeping rough, Hare is befriended by a community of so-called ‘marginals’ who live in anarchic communes on the fringes of society. After recuperating, Hare decides to search for his estranged wife, an artist who fled mainstream society after the government closed all art colleges. He encounters another group, known as ‘Diggers’, who live in abandoned subterranean chambers that were originally intended for use in the event of nuclear war. A group of young Diggers attempt to seize their own plot of land, but the attempt is a failure, and Hare is obliged to lead a group of fleeing marginals and Diggers into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious patch of land where, it is rumoured, nothing is able to survive.

The novel is clearly informed by the political events of the decade in which it was written. The account, towards the end of the novel, of the suppression of a demonstration by police in full riot gear, is reminiscent of events during the UK miners' strike of 1984-85. Similarly, the account of the way in which the government had manipulated popular fears about nuclear war in order to effect programmes of social manipulation, indicates the closing years of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West.