The Broken Land by Ian McDonald
"The Broken Land" is a novel by Ian McDonald that presents a surreal and thought-provoking journey through a richly imagined world. The story follows a young girl named Mathembe Fileli as she navigates a planet marked by shifting landscapes and complex political structures. The narrative unfolds across six distinct sections—each capturing different aspects of this vibrant yet troubled environment, reminiscent of various global regions, including Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.
Central to the plot is the conflict between two factions: the technologically advanced Proclaimers, who maintain a totalitarian regime, and the Confessors, who specialize in biotechnology and long for self-determination. The tale begins in the idyllic Chepsenyt Township, where Mathembe’s life is upended when imperial forces destroy her village, prompting her journey as a refugee. As she travels to the ancient city of Ol Kot and beyond, Mathembe's skills in biological manipulation become crucial for her survival and rise to prominence.
Through her experiences, the novel explores themes of oppression, resilience, and the quest for identity, culminating in a confrontation with a radical movement that seeks to redefine the future through genetic engineering. Overall, "The Broken Land" merges elements of speculative fiction and social commentary, inviting readers to reflect on the implications of technology and the human condition amidst chaos.
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Subject Terms
The Broken Land
First published: 1992 (as Hearts, Hands, and Voices, 1992, in the United Kingdom)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Science fiction—cultural exploration
Time of work: The far future
Locale: The empire of the Proclaimers
The Plot
From its bravura opening line—“Grandfather was a tree”—and its initial image of a living house running amok through a village, Ian McDonald’s fourth novel quickly establishes a bizarre setting and a haunting tone that seem to owe as much to surrealism as to earlier science fiction. The Broken Land essentially is the tale of a young girl’s quest across a planet whose shifting landscapes and political structures alternately call to mind Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and contemporary Ireland.
These vividly realized settings and the unfolding quest itself are suggested by the novel’s six sections: “The Township,” “The Road,” “The City,” “The River,” “The Camps,” and “The Borderland.” The central conflict in the story is one of biology and technology. The Proclaimers have established a totalitarian empire that rules the planet through conventional technology, and the Confessors have developed advanced skills in biotechnology since the discovery, generations earlier, of a technique for manipulating DNA directly from the human nervous system. The Confessors have long sought self-determination and freedom.
In Chepsenyt Township, the idyllic Confessor village where Mathembe Fileli lives, nearly everything is grown rather than manufactured, and free “organicals” called trux are farmed like animals. A kind of immortality has been achieved: The heads of ancestors can retain a kind of semi-vegetable life embedded in Ancestor Trees, where they partake of a kind of spiritual consciousness called “the Dreaming.”
Oppression and violence also are part of Mathembe’s world. Her response is the same as that of Oskar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959): She refuses to speak. When Chepsenyt is destroyed by imperial forces for harboring members of a resistance movement called the Warriors of Destiny, Mathembe becomes a refugee. She sets out with her family to join her uncle’s Faradje in the ancient city of Ol Kot, which is a vivid amalgam of Calcutta, Charles Dickens’ London, and the Los Angeles envisioned by cyberpunk writers. In Ol Kot, she finds use for her skills in biological manipulation, designing and selling organical toys in the district of the city known as the Flesh Market.
The Confessor revolution reaches Ol Kot. Riots break out, and reprisals are violent. Mathembe is displaced again when the city is burned. Separated from her remaining family—except for her disembodied grandfather, whose head she rescued from the Ancestor Tree in her village—she becomes a boat person, stowing away on Unchunkolo. After more than three centuries of additions and modifications, that enormous riverboat has become a society unto itself. Mathembe is allowed to stay on board because of her biodesign skills, revealed by one of her organical toys. She is assigned to try to revive the boat’s failing agricultural ecosystems, and her success makes her a nearly legendary figure on the boat.
Word arrives that the Proclaimer-Confessor war has ended in an agreement to divide the land. Mathembe sets out to find her family, journeying first to sprawling displaced person camps and finally to a mysterious Borderland, where her mother has joined a movement to end violence through a radical advance in genetic engineering that promises to dramatically alter the world in which Mathembe lives.