Kay Dick

"They" is de aanduiding voor een mysterieuze macht die de "ik"-figuur en haar vrienden bedreigt.

A Sequence of Unease

They

'Radical' - Carmen Maria Machado

They (Faber Editions)

They is a dream, a surreal nightmare which sends a shock right to the heart of our cultural complacency.

As you read it you should remember that the men and women who live and die in it might easily be you. (They could be snatched out of your hand, quite suddenly, and pulped. No reason would be given, except pure destructive savagery.)

Those who struggle in its pages to maintain their reason, their sanity, their capacity to love and hope, are not so far removed (nor are the forces that menace them) from our own and, as we fondly imagine, unruffled lives.

As bureaucracy and governmental control proliferate, Kay Dick pleads for the individual and intellectual freedoms which are so rapidly being eroded. Her book is both a poignant celebration of these values and an anguished caveat.

Carmen Maria Machado

Introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer. 'A creepily prescient tale ... Insidiously horrifying!' Margaret Atwood 'A masterpiece of creeping dread.' Emily St. John Mandel 'Crystalline ... The signature of an enchantress.' Edna O'Brien 'Lush, hypnotic, compulsive ... A reminder of where groupthink leads.' Eimear McBride 'A masterwork of English pastoral horror: eerie and bewitching.' Claire-Louise Bennett 'I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.' Lauren Groff This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY are coming closer . . . THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ... Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.

The Lost Dystopian 'Masterpiece' (Emily St. John Mandel)

Ça commence par la mort d’un chien, par des bruits de pas étouffés, par la confiscation de livres. Par le sac de la National Gallery, purgée de ses œuvres. Puis viennent les miradors, érigés pour surveiller les côtes, et des hommes armés, qui parcourent les campagnes en détruisant chaque œuvre d’art qu’ils dénichent... et ceux qui cherchent à les protéger. Ils capturent les dissidents – les écrivains, les peintres, les musiciens et même les célibataires et les couples sans enfants – lors de vastes rafles. Ils veulent soigner la société des personnalités subversives. Mais quelques survivants ont réussi à fonder en secret un havre de paix pour les réfugiés culturels, leur permettant de préserver leur art, de créer, d’aimer et de se souvenir. Du moins, jusqu’à ce qu'on les découvre, ou qu’on les dénonce. Traduit de l’anglais par Patrick Imbert.

Kay Dick

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