THESE days, dystopian fiction is quite the sensation among young adult readers. However, it is more focused on the human or political aspects instead of nature; Jostein Gaarder sets out to remedy this in his latest novel, The World According to Anna. Having grown up admiring Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, I was thrilled to find a hardcover copy of his latest novel with a beautiful cover design at a local bookstore recently. A mere 210 pages long, it took me a couple of hours to read the book from cover to cover. Although not quite as exciting as Sophie’s World, The World According to Anna is engaging and thought-provoking.
Gaarder’s latest novel follows Anna, a Norwegian girl with an active imagination. Anna’s dreams are remarkably realistic but she thinks that there is more to it. Her passion for nature and her odd dreams worry her parents so a few days before she turns 16, her mother persuades her to see a psychologist; Anna happily agrees on the condition that her boyfriend will come along too. The doctor, however, tells Anna that there’s nothing wrong with her and that her parents are lucky to have a daughter as imaginative and sensitive as her.
Two days before her birthday she is given her presents: a smartphone and a ruby ring; an heirloom that has been in the family for nearly a hundred years. That night Anna dreams that she is her own great-granddaughter Nova, 70 years in the future, and that nature is utterly destroyed by that time: “In Nova’s world, natural habitats had been destroyed, and thousands of plants and animals had become extinct”. When she wakes up she realises that in the present humans are on the brink of annihilating the delicate balance of nature but the current generation still has a chance to do something about it. In her dream Anna has created a completely different future world which exists in parallel dimension to her ‘real’ world; and “if she pulled on one thread the whole thing would unravel — episodes from the past or the future, or even from a different now...”
By alternating between the present and the future, Gaarder makes the immediacy of climate change clearer. He beautifully encapsulates the wonder that nature is in this rather short novel. “Planet earth was more breathtaking than all the things in the sky put together. Wasn’t a squirrel more remarkable than a black hole?”
The World According to Anna is a timely environmental dystopian fiction novel that aims to create awareness in young readers instead of sensationalising the approaching doom. However, if you’re looking for an action-packed post-apocalyptic novel, then this is not the book for you.
The World According to Anna
(DYSTOPIAN FICTION)
By Jostein Gaarder
Translated by Donald Bartlett
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK
ISBN 978-0297609735
240pp.
