Dystopia is not my preferred genre of choice. Sci-fi, not so much in books, though I do enjoy Star Trek. It seems to work better on screen, for me.
But, having read Kamila Shamsie's adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, and then two translations of Antigone (Seamus Heaney's and Anne Carson's), it seemed only fitting to find the even more recent dystopian adaptation by Veronica Roth, Arch-Conspirator (2023).
Shamsie moved the Greek tragedy to 2015, largely based in London, and the Greek family turned to British-Pakistanis, with Kreon becoming a Home Secretary (published in 2017, this was before Sajid Javid became the first non-white British Home Secretary). "Enjoyed" is entirely the wrong word for my feelings about this book. I highly recommend it, but the Home Secretary utterly infuriated me (writing in the margins was very cathartic). And then I went to read Hansard, which didn't help. I wonder if Javid read Home Fire before he became Home Secretary.
Roth, however, moved the action to even further into the future, to a planet which has become a wasteland, and women (or perhaps "wombs") have become a resource. You can probably see the themes emerging in Roth's adaptation.
If you're familiar with Antigone, you know what's going to happen. If you aren't, well, it's a Greek tragedy, which should give you enough of a clue to work it out.
Despite the setting, perhaps because it's only a novella and it was number four on the list of Antigones to read, it didn't take long to zip through Arch-Conspirator. Unlike a couple of other novels I have dealing with similar themes to Home Fire, which are still hoping to be read beyond chapter 1. Not, you understand, in time for the essay-deadline, which is looming. Just generally. One day.
I haven't read Roth's other work (she's most famous for the Divergent series), being, as I've said, not a fan of dystopia. I'm unlikely to read Divergent even now. But Arch-Conspirator was a good read, a good adaptation.
Albert Camus famously said "Antigone is right, but Kreon is not wrong", with regards the central conflict of the play. Both Roth and Shamsie definitely come down on the side of Antigone being in the right, and Kreon being wrong.
I just think it's awfully petty to take out grievances on a corpse, whatever its owner did while alive. Like Charles II have Oliver Cromwell dug up to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
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