K-SCORE: 90
Author: Hugh Howey
Spoiler Level: Major and ruining, by necessity I assure you. Sorry.
Dystopia done well - that’s what you’ll get when you read Hugh Howey’s Wool. It exists decades after The Giver and Fahrenheit 451, in an age where every young adult novel (Divergent, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Unwind, The 5th Wave, etc. etc.) is trying to do the same kind of thing, and yet it stands high above all of those novels, all of that ambient noise, rising to meet the challenges of its premise, lovingly created by a dedicated storyteller, who was willing to put the time and energy into creating the world of his nightmares. I’m so glad Hugh Howey found the strength to shove this story into my hands.
“some redundancy in character”
“Howey has meaningful things to say about the ways we partition societies, about those who hide the truth because they don’t have confidence others can handle it responsibly, about how easily people are turned to violence against strangers, and how breakable our world really is.”
Wool suffers at times from problems of new novelists, attributes of writing that I still struggle with in my own work. Howey will occasionally describe something three times when one would have done just fine, making sure his reader gets the idea. Yes, this can mean that more readers get the point, but those that needed but a single image, a single reminder of a concept, a piece of background information, a thematic link, start to babysat. For example, Howey connects Juliette's mechanical problem-solving background with her triumphs of human ingenuity and spirit about twenty times. It's a good theme and one that was well-served throughout the story, but he didn't need to overtly talk about it quite so much. Better to leave some in the arsenic air outside than to patronize those with the courage to stick with you. Not always; often he's eloquent and careful. Sometimes though, it can be a little heavy-handed, especially given the subject. The beginning with Holston miserably talking about his wife, Alison, going to cleaning, and then heading off to cleaning himself is particularly dreary. When I was but fifty pages in, Graham asked me how the novel was going and I couldn't think of anything more fitting to describe it other than, "dark." The content gets darker, but the prose lightens, for which I was grateful.
There’s also some redundancy in character. The story could have been plotted combining Holston and Marnes, combing Knox and Marck, combing Peter and Sims. A few of those redundancies might help flesh out the cast, create the illusion of full silos, but it’s already a story with too many characters. Howey doesn’t have enough pages to do everything he wants to with the leader of Supply, for example, or the kids in Silo 17. Their inclusion inevitably means less of other things, and it’s such a thoroughly-designed world that there is a great deal that I wanted to know more about, that Howey could have spent more time on: things like the forbidden relationships, the way the lotteries work, the way hydroponics operates to feed everyone, what all the IT servers are actually storing and where the power allotments are actually going, and especially what the nature of the older uprisings are such that silo history was deleted. That last tidbit is an established bit of silo mystery that’s never really explained.
It’s another story that suffers from problems of pacing, as well. Howey spends a disproportionate amount of time on the introductory characters of Holston, Marnes, and Johns given their eventual fates and not enough time with the crucial Juliette, the wonderful protagonist. He could have found a way to plot in the sparks of silo disruption and uprising, while focusing in on Juliette sooner. I'd have been entirely happy with the Holston and Johns sections for their perspectives were interesting, if only the novel had been a hundred-thousand words longer. In the middle, when Juliette is beyond her journey of understanding the silo politics and onto her journey of survival and discovery, Wool is at it’s best, heart-pounding, thought-provoking and incredible. Yet around the edges, its quality wanes a bit. Again, it's not much. The end is reassuring. Howey cares about his characters and takes them to good places. And he didn’t forget anyone or anything. But time-wise, there could have been an extra hundred pages or even two-hundred pages getting to that destination point. WAY more of what Juliette does in Silo 17 should matter. I loved her tinkering in that location, fighting to stay alive with Solo, but ultimately it seems the only thing that makes a difference is her ability to communicate with her old home. That’s frustrating. And there is a way or multiple ways to bring it all together, if only Howey had tweaked the pacing and the plotting.
The largest issue I have with the premise is that Howey’s IT villains and the silo designers seem to have ignorantly created a tinderbox of a home. It’s as if Londoners continued using thatched-roofing after the great fire. That silo playbook that Lukas reads shouldn’t be filled with quite so much “how to fight against uprising” content as much as it should be filled with “how to pacify” content. Keeping the people in the silo happy and ignorant would be essential and Howey nails the second one, but the former dies to the inevitability of conflict. I can accept this being tastefully ignored though; addressing it would constitute a thematic shift somewhere.
Those all may seem like substantial faults in the novel, but I assure you that they don’t greatly detract from the experience of reading Wool. It’s not a fun or funny story in all its 500 pages, but it’s not supposed to be and it never feels like a slog. The enjoyment is in growing attached to the characters living underground in the dystopian silo and, with those characters, unveiling humanity's past while the peaceful status quo unravels.
The silos feel like places I could explore. That there are two that are essentially identical in design, one destroyed and one not destroyed, is one of the most supremely clever and compelling ideas for setting in any novel I’ve read. Creepy, is the word for Silo 17, if not outright scary. And that you travel with the characters in Silo 18 before you know about the existence of Silo 17 is brilliant. Those first steps Juliette takes out of her home had me gripping the text a little tighter, and it gets better from there. Her foray into the upper levels with all of the bodies down to IT then down to the flooded Mechanical sections are thrilling, and all the while a sense of the true scope of the world and the conflicts at play come across as both knowable and too large for resolution looms.
“And the agoraphobe Walker is the most interesting character Howey created, a truly wonderful man, a potent blend of mechanical mathematical talent, passion, compassion, and paranoia - he’s a paradigm for the best of the best Wool has to offer.”
Juliette is a great character. The first scene with her shows her putting her whole body strength into tightening a bolt with a giant wrench. She goes on to fix the generator in mechanical so it isn’t deafeningly noisy, so it will bring power to the thousands of silo dwellers more consistently for a longer time. Her sense of right and wrong is divorced from institutional justice, which is absolutely what is needed for the conflicts Howey presents. Juliette is an established survivor, evident from that first little story told by one of the guys in Mechanical about her tricking her bosses when she was a young shadow. She’s someone who knows how to do things. It’s the perfect vessel for exploring this world, these huge and demanding conflicts, and these trying people, who range from dangerously misguided to understandably confused.
The other characters that float to the surface of Wool are good too. Bernard is painful to endure most of the time, but believable in his role. Lukas has a sweetness I admired, and he doesn’t get too badly overwhelmed even when too much responsibility is thrust upon him. And the agoraphobe Walker is the most interesting character Howey created, a truly wonderful man, a potent blend of mechanical mathematical talent, passion, compassion, and paranoia - he’s a paradigm for the best of the best Wool has to offer. This passage about the sheriff's deputy made me to bite my finger and reread over and over again:
“She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this, she decided. He was an easy man to figure, on of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.”
Hugh Howey may have some fears of nuclear annihilation that I don’t quite share, and when circumstances are this bleak, it’s hard to find that lightness needed in any good story to balance the parts of the plot. Somehow though, in this brutal dystopian world, Howey finds connections between people rooted in emotions and concepts that are perfectly relatable. When he advances his complex and terrifying plot, he does so incrementally with realistic steps. A few falters in pacing and a tiny bit of over-ambition, given the length he aspired to, weigh Wool down a little bit, but mostly it feels like the story he wanted to tell. Howey has meaningful things to say about the ways we partition societies, about those who hide the truth because they don’t have confidence that others can handle it responsibly, about how easily people are turned to violence against strangers, and how breakable our world really is. Were those the only things he said, I might have been inclined to ignore him - too grim - but he also lovingly tells a story of characters with a capacity to love, who fight for their existence and the existence of others, of people who rise to the challenge of balancing difficult choices. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment, this novel, and if he continues to write then I imagine he will make something even better in the future for he is a man with vision. Finding books like Wool bring me great pleasure, and make me think that maybe I too can find my place as one of these people who has something to say and knows how to say it.