LAVENDER SPIKE

In a post-apocalyptic future ruled by a dictator who uses art to control the surviving populace, an independent painter makes a bid to help a brewing rebellion.

Tremblay’s dystopian SF novel takes place in a ruined future Earth ravaged by six world wars. The ultimate victor was a warlord called Skylah, “Ruler of the Eyes and the Hands,” who dropped an apocalyptic defoliation bomb (“All photosynthetic vegetabilia was instantly petrified”). Now, all that’s left of civilization is a high-tech, affluent, still-green domed city called Mahl and the outlying “Dumps,” slums in which foragers are preyed upon. The final war abolished religion and instituted the “New Art Government” (NAG); temples were turned into galleries, and art now reigns as the supreme social structure and means of control. “Trigger” artists produce oversize psychotropic canvases that play to the viewers’ most lurid and mind-altering sensations. Beholders are either turned into manageable packs of art-addicted “junkheads” or violent “Hounds” who fanatically support and promote their favorite artists. Isobel is one of the only non-government-affiliated painters in the Dumps, doing landscapes purely for the joy of it. This habit marks her as subversive and a target for the Hounds. After her studio is raided, Isobel shelters with rebels who intend to smuggle her into Mahl City in the guise of a Trigger to create a pipeline for weapons and espionage. Things don’t go exactly as planned. The author, who’s also an artist and musician, asks a lot in the suspension-of-disbelief department, and it might be tempting to see this SF yarn as a cathartic satire of the whole pretentious gallery scene (What if art trendoids literally ruled the world?). But the characterizations are not campy, and pain, passions, and violence are conveyed as agonizingly and earnestly here as they were in the Hunger Games and Handmaid’s Tale cycles. In a wise gambit, the sensation-producing paintings are never described in detail—only their devastating emotional effects are depicted, and Tremblay doesn’t overextend her metaphor to include juicy targets such as the pathologies of big-money art dealing and collecting.

Cautious brush strokes help sell this speculative story of art as the basis of a future police state.