{"id":58097,"date":"2018-09-12T15:21:23","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T13:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/2018\/09\/12\/not-the-booker-sweet-fruit-sour-land-by-rebecca-ley-review-post-apocalyptic-confusion\/"},"modified":"2018-09-12T15:21:23","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T13:21:23","slug":"not-the-booker-sweet-fruit-sour-land-by-rebecca-ley-review-post-apocalyptic-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/?p=58097","title":{"rendered":"Not the Booker: Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley review \u2013 post-apocalyptic confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Political incompetence and male entitlement speak to our times, but it\u2019s not enough to make up for an obscure setting and laboured proseHelp us judge this year\u2019s Not the Booker prizeThere\u2019s no faulting the timeliness of Sweet Fruit, Sour Land. It\u2019s set in a Britain destroyed by famine and shortages of material goods. The leader of the country is a woman who churns out meaningless slogans but achieves nothing. The men beneath her \u2013 judging by a minister we meet called George \u2013 are deceitful, selfish, violent abusers of truth and seducers of women. You don\u2019t need me to draw the parallels.Rebecca Ley\u2019s novel is given urgency by the mess of Brexit and revelations of #MeToo \u2013 but it isn\u2019t a straightforward future projection of our current problems. The prime minister turns out to be some kind of socialist who says she has nationalised power supplies and made things more \u201cfair and equal\u201d than they were during the days of a mysterious \u201cblackout\u201d. The memo about equality hasn\u2019t filtered through to the rest of her government, however. George has been attending Versailles-style parties where tables groan with foods that normal people can only dream of eating. Continue reading&#8230;<br \/>\nVia: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2018\/sep\/12\/not-the-booker-sweet-fruit-sour-land-by-rebecca-ley-review-post-apocalyptic-confusion\" target=\"_blank\">Not the Booker: Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley review \u2013 post-apocalyptic confusion<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Political incompetence and male entitlement speak to our times, but it\u2019s not enough to make up for an obscure setting and laboured proseHelp us judge this year\u2019s Not the Booker prizeThere\u2019s no faulting the timeliness of Sweet Fruit, Sour Land. It\u2019s set in a Britain destroyed by famine and shortages [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}