My life in books

Karin Tidbeck’s debut novel Amatka is a complex and challenging fiction of social criticism - calling it satire, or dystopia, is far too inadequate, though it certainly performs the functions of both genres.

We are in a nominally future world, on a colony planet, but at the same time, Amatka is, like Erewhon, set nowhere in time or space. Amatka is one of several cities on this planet, settled in a cold and harsh region. Like the other cities, it is somewhat of a socialist/syndicalist managed economy. People live communally in small groups, children are raised in a separate children’s house, personal property is limited to one’s own necessary effects.

But there are some very odd things happening. Everything in this world is labelled, and people say the names of things over and over again. At first, there’s no obvious explanation for this behaviour, and the reader wonders why everyone is repeating the names of things, writing them on everything. I was speculating that some plague had damaged humans’ cognitive abilities, weakening object permanence. But the reason, when it’s revealed, is stranger still. Reality is fragile, and the existence of material objects must be frequently supported by bring named, or they dissolve into a kind of featureless paste.

As one reads, one becomes aware that there are two general classes of things. One, identified by the adjective “good” consists of things made from materials that the colonists brought with them. These things, it seems, are far less prone to dissolving, they hold their shape and firm without constant naming and labelling, they are resistant to other subtle dangers suggested but never spoken of or defined. Things not identified as good, things made from materials on the planet, are things without permanence. And the material from which these impermanent things are made is, of course, the same stuff they dissolve into when they are not named often enough.

And there’s a mystery, about a lost colony no one talks about. Once, when humans first settled this place, there were five colony cities founded. Then one was no longer there.

The protagonist, Vanja, lives in one of the four remaining colony cities, Essre. She has been asked by the company/collective she works in to travel to Amatka on a kind of market research jaunt. Her collective makes personal hygiene products, and it is her assignment to find out what the people in Amatka need, use, and want, for things like soap and tooth powder.

It doesn’t take long for her to learn that the people of Amatka are not all that interested in the idea of new things, things that might come from other colonies. At the same time, she discovers that the people of Amatka suffer from frequent skin problems, rashes, eczema, cracked skin.

As Vanja goes about her research, while living in a communal household and getting to know her housemates, she learns about other strange things that have been happening in Amatka. Things that are not talked about. Some years ago, there was an incident, and a hundred people died. This may, or may not, be the reason that the city seems too empty, too quiet. And the nearby lake has started freezing over, every night, and thawing in the morning, even though the temperature does not change that much. There’s a serious shortage of “good paper” such that even important things like medical records are being written on paper that will decay, and the books in the library are being seized and recycled for the use of the city’s central committee.

Vanja has never really been content with life as it is lived. As one of her new housemates notes, she forgets to name and mark things too often, it suggests that she wants to know more. And she does. Much of the novel is about her slow and frustrating search for answers - not so much to the question of why things are the way they are, but to what if anything could be better.

In Amatka, Tidbeck has written is a complex and powerful parable about hw we sustain the nature of our world, our reality, our interpretation of our selves, and of the necessity of change to create a way of living that is more free, and more in harmony.