This dystopian novella won a minor literary award in 1977 then went out of print a couple of years later and was only rediscovered in a second hand bookshop after the author's death in 2001. It concerns the takeover of the reins of power by a mysterious and shadowy group, or collection of individuals, known only as They. They hate individualism, single people, all creative art and literature, whether new or pre-existing. They randomly take action, smashing art, stealing books, beating up or arresting and torturing people who are or who carry out the things they hate. The prose is very matter of fact, and the relationships between the narrator and other characters rather unclear. While I usually enjoy (if that is the right word) dystopian stories I did not enjoy this as the motivations and background of the oppressive They were not explored, giving it a rather fantastical feel, a bit like a J G Ballard modern dystopian horror novel. It might be argued that this approach adds to the starkness and horror, but it didn't quite work for me. ( )

random that i read this right after a reread of fahrenheit 451 but very apropos. this is very similar in theme but much more subtle and vague about who is doing the controlling, and the erasing of the arts. carmen maria machado wrote an insightful introduction to this that really highlights this, how the reader can make assumptions about who "they" are, but that the author purposefully left this up in the air, asking the reader to really think about if their own political side could actually be "they," if maybe the ends might justify the means.

this book highlights both the erasure of anything intellectual and with a subjective viewpoint (books, painting, sculpture, poetry) but also the "danger" of living alone, of thinking by yourself. most singles are (sorry) singled out as dangerous, and it's said again and again that living with someone else is safer from the crackdowns of the authorities (whoever they are). the authorities operate in all kinds of ways, sometimes stealing art or ripping out the inscriptions in books that make it personal, sometimes erasing someone's memory or erasing the person themselves. i wasn't sure of the reasoning behind when violence was used and when it was withheld but i know from psychology that not being certain of a repercussion makes a person much more cautious and stressed about doing the right thing.

this will require a reread for me, for sure, because i know i missed quite a bit. like, is the unnamed narrator in each section the same person, or a different one, as everyone around them has changed? there are similarities and i had assumed it was the same person throughout, but i think maybe that with a more careful reading i would see that that doesn't make sense. the tension throughout really seemed to build and by the end it really had me in its grip. so i for sure missed some of the more subtle things that this book is clearly doing. i didn't, for example, see the queerness that machado talked about in the introduction, but next time i read this i'll go much slower, and maybe i'll understand more. ( )

I had seen this book on BorrowBox but it was only after @sharon.read.this and @readsbyross both posted about it that I decided to give it a go.

In some ways the foreword of this book which explains who Kay Dick was along with how the books was published forty years ago and mostly dismissed as the frantic rambling of a menopausal queer women only to be rediscovered in a second hand shop leading to its posthumous resurrection is the most intriguing thing about it.

The story is about a dystopian Britain where gangs of people roam the country in an aim to destroy all creative works and the people who make them. This destruction happens “off screen” and when we meet the eponymous They it is always with a in somewhat civil scenes filled with menace but none of the violence we hear about second hand.

The story itself is fine. A little disjointed for me and sometimes difficult to follow but the bigger question it poses about why we should create work if it is only to be destroyed is made all the more real when you consider this piece of art was lost for 40 years.

It wouldn’t be a top read for me but definitely important in the light of Kay Dick’s legacy and the reclaiming of it.
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They, subtitled A Sequence of Unease, is a strange little novella first published in 1977 and now reissued by Faber Books. Its author, Kay Dick, was a bisexual intellectual who wrote fiction as well as literary biographies, reviews and journalistic pieces. Her background must surely have shaped the concerns raised in this novella.

They is set during an unspecified time period (although, likely meant to be a contemporary one) in which England is slowly but surely being taken over by a class of loutish anti-intellectuals who use violent bullying tactics to eradicate the arts. They go around the country burning books, destroying sculptures and paintings and generally stifling all attempts at creativity through acts of torture. But the agenda of this philistine group is not limited to attacking the arts. They also engage in wanton vandalism, encourage their children to be cruel to animals and urinate against public buildings, and look askance at persons who prefer to live alone (and who might therefore be tempted to think individually).

The novella’s narrative approach is a strange and potentially confusing one. Although written in the first person, we are told very little about the (unnamed) narrator except that the narrator (He? She? They?) appears to be a writer and moves in artistic circles. The story is split into a number of vignettes which do not clearly follow one another. Indeed, at times I even wondered whether the narrator was changing from one chapter/section to another although repeated references to the narrator’s dog suggest otherwise. Although on the one hand this detached style makes it difficult to feel empathy with the characters, it does contribute very effectively to the strong sense of increasing danger and impending dread. Dick taps into genre fiction to achieve her results. Thus, They is a clear example of dystopian fiction, but it also has echoes of the horror genre in its description of the bucolic landscapes of England in the grips of an oppressive, suffocating threat.

They reminded me somewhat of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (referenced by Carmen Maria Machado in her brief but insightful introduction to this Faber edition) as well as some of the more “political” of J.B. Priestley’s weird fiction. But it is also very much its own thing, a disturbing little book which was (unsurprisingly) misunderstood on its first publication and now making a deserved return to print.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2021/12/they-by-kay-dick.html ( )

This is a really interesting novella that requires a lot from the Reader. We are presented with a dystopic world but given next to no information about it. It is almost like a rough sketch in which we have to visualise and fill in details making assumptions about what we might already know about the classic elements of a dystopian novel. We wonder who They are and what Their motivations are (beyond the obvious: destroy art and artists, remove creativity and emotion and that old classic chestnut of demanding conformity). What happened to Them to make Them want this world? What is Their power structure? Why cruelty to animals? (yes there are some awful incidents in the novel). There is no big uprising. Instead we just see things from an unknown person (or persons) point of view. It feels like it is one character but on a second read I realised it is likely more than one character but with so many similarities to make it unclear and confusing. I suspect this was part of the author's intent. To have us confused and unsure and as the title says, uneasy. I don't know if I liked it but if the aim was to make me feel unsettled then job well done.

CW: Animal killing/cruelty, suicide, torture ( )