Facial Justice

Published as drab postwar Britain was about to burst forth into the swinging ’60s, Hartley’s curious dystopian satire takes aim at egalitarian schemes with a jaunty surrealism that calls to mind the buoyant absurdities of the TV series The Prisoner or the film Zardoz. The subterranean survivors of World War III emerge to reshape England’s blighted wastes into a correspondingly flattened nanny state, a gently sedated and infantilized populace termed “patients and delinquents” by the disembodied voice of an all-powerful “Darling Dictator,” whose whimsical edicts and alliterative buzzwords keep everyone on their toes. To discourage envy (or “Bad E”), women deemed noticeably attractive or ugly voluntarily have their faces surgically deadened into an acceptably bland compromise. (Men’s faces are their own; the patriarchy is alive and well.) At the last moment, pretty young Jael 97 decides to save her face, and this gentle subversion of her otherwise sackcloth existence leads to others, culminating in an uprising—or downdragging—to roil the painstaking placidity of her “relaxed and invalidish Civilization.”