Tim Pears’s seventh novel presents a comedy of middle-class manners through the lens of science fiction. The year is 2058, and Britain is short of both food and fuel. To explain how this came about, the narrator, Theo, looks back to a family Christmas with his grandparents five decades earlier, when he was 13. His story is dramatic — featuring a brawl and three fatal shootings — but the interest lies less in its uniqueness than in its potential to sum up what Pears clearly believes is our present-day decadence.
It begins with Theo’s parents driving to Shropshire. Theo switches off his MP3 player to listen to them discuss their loft conversion and “the historically proven impossibility of an occupying army imposing peace in Afghanistan”. A teasing tone here lays down a formula for the portrayal of some predictably odious relatives from Hampstead: Uncle Jonny, a would-be property developer whose mobile phone keeps bringing bad news about cash flow; his Argentine trophy wife Lorna; and their obnoxious twins Baz and Xan, who are baffled by their grandad’s use of a barograph to forecast the weather (they have an app for that).
Environmental themes are aired amid this parade of stereotypes by Theo’s grandmother, who rants about overpopulation and climate change. Because these dinner-table tirades turn out to be the symptom of a serious illness, rather than the result of rational reflection, nobody takes much notice; except for Theo, who, in the future, has to resort to burning books to keep warm.
The solemnity with which Pears presents this mildly apocalyptic scenario sits uneasily next to his satirical take on the gadget-hungry gas-guzzlers who get the blame for it. A more immediate difficulty comes from Theo’s bizarrely variegated language. In the space of seven lines, we read about a hedge “circumvallating” his grandparents’ lawn, before reading about how Baz and Xan “rinsed” him. He uses slang such as “merked” and “nang”, yet describes his first kiss thus: “The bodily pleasures I would have regarded as supreme in my experience of life hitherto were rendered insignificant, facile, by the delicious sensations I now discovered.” Theo is meant to be a geek — he spends an afternoon tallying the results of some 200 games of Scrabble that his parents once played without him — but even so.
Passages about the bloody history of the border country between England and Wales, where the bulk of the action takes place (hence the title), prove awkward to integrate into the short narrative. The novel works best when it retains a sense of humour, which tends to be reserved for scenes that express concern about the accelerated nature of modern childhood. At 12, Baz and Xan joke about blow jobs and brag about the “theatre-quality performance” of their in-car television. Another of Theo’s cousins considers breast enlargement a viable prospect “if they don’t get bigger”; she is 13.
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It is a tall order to link such anxieties to a mid-21st-century fuel crisis, and perhaps Pears folds a few too many ingredients into the mix. Yet even if some of its terrain seems best avoided — I suspect Baz and Xan’s rendition of the misogynistic gangsta-rap hit “Mess Wiv Me” (an invention) was as embarrassing to write as it is to read — Disputed Land nonetheless comes across as a heartfelt attempt to make us think hard about where we are headed.