The drug is tested and proved to work the authorities are of course desperate to get control of it. He has invented a new drug, a truth serum, which will cause anyone injected to immediately spill the beans about anything and everything it is impossible for them to resist. Only later did I realise that it was a good picture of my relationship with Linda, in which I felt myself to be frighteningly transparent…”Īs the book opens, Kall is imprisoned and embarking on his story in almost diary form. “I stood in the great darkness, powerfully illuminated by spotlights from out of the darkness I felt the Eyes directed at me, and I wriggled like a worm to get away, but I could not avoid feeling mortified with shame at the indecent rags I was wearing. The landscape is grim, and in fact most of the population never seem to see the outdoors. Children are taken away from parents at a certain age, and if a marriage does not produce children or fails, the partners divorce and remarry. Everyone is hiding their real self from everybody else, as to display anything at odds with the requirements of those in control is an aberration. People’s lives have been reduced to a basic existence they have their work function, they marry in order to produce future “Fellow Soldiers” for the World State, and all feelings and emotions are suppressed. The population is subdued and subdivided, with the main protagonist Leo Kall, a scientist, living with his wife Linda in Chemistry City No. “Kallocain” is subtitled “A Novel of the 21 st Century” and is set in a future world which is tightly controlled. “The sacred and necessary foundation of the State’s existence is our mutual well-founded mistrust of each other.” Her life was short (born in 1900, she committed suicide in 1941) and also complex a committed anti-fascist, after an apparent marriage of convenience she left her husband, underwent psychoanalysis and spent much of the rest of her life with her partner, Margot Hanel, to whom she referred as her “wife”.

However, there are any number of works predicting a dark future for humanity, often written at troubled times during the 20 th century and Penguin have recently reissued such a book which has unjustly slipped from view – “Kallocain” by Karin Boye.īoye was a Swedish author most known in her home country for her poetry however, it’s her novels, in particular this one, which have brought her international recognition. Our modern world often seems to be getting very close to a dystopian nightmare, and most of our visions of that kind of world tend to be drawn from works like “Brave New World” and “Nineteen Eighty Four”.

Kallocain boye