Review of South by Babak Lakghomi

Myself, like many, many readers out there, enjoy a good dystopia. They balance social and political concerns with tales of individuals struggling through tough times. And perhaps nothing triggers my/our ire more than tyrannical forms of government. Zamyatin's We, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale—these and several others have gone down in history as cautionary yet gripping stories for the forms of government they present and their impact on the individual. Looking to add his name to the list is Babak Lakghomi's 2023 South.

South is the story of an unnamed journalist who heads to an unnamed part of the world, ostensibly in the southern hemisphere, to investigate what happened to his deceased father, and in the process research and write a book about him. At first things seem normal at the places he visits. The man is able to write, he is helped by those around him, and he generates pages of manuscript. But slowly things start to crumble. Little bits of freedom are taken away here and there, and he becomes aware he is being monitored. What follows is a downward spiral of understanding and circumstance.

South left me at something of a loss what precisely it was trying to be or do. For example, I struggle to understand where Lakghomi felt the book would fit into world literature. Anti-authoritarian, ok, that is always a good message. Dystopia, ok, we've seen plenty of those. Something else? Perhaps a touch of slipstream / magic realism / non-reality? Ok, there are bits of that... But what does the whole amount to? Do the characters and their situations strike chords which resonate once the last page is turned? Is the book transcendent?

You may find something different in your reading of South, but my answer kept coming back to “no”. Every door of reflection I opened turned up empty. The book doesn't have enough meat on the bone to generate that level of reflective engagement. The main character is more NPC than human. And the inflection points of plot and theme are ham-fisted in a fashion only made even more overt by the choice to use minimalism as the mode of telling. As a result, it's difficult to draw conclusions grander than: authoritarianism is bad, mmm-k.

The only nuanced explanation I can come up with for Lakghomi's thematic intentions is commentary on the current state of the West. Perhaps how some of its democracies are slipping closer to totalitarianism? Maybe that Trudeau, Trump, or Orban are moving closer to dictators than leaders in of free worlds? But it's a weak explanation. There are not enough elements of the background to triangulate with certainty that, indeed, such is the book's intent. For example, the media saturated existence we know is absent in the book's world. The main character somehow exists outside that noise, and is thus unaware of any major government decisions which impact him. Each step of the transition from freedom to un-freedom happens in a convenient ether. For example, the man's manuscript is censored more and more with each editor's review, but Lakghomi does not inform the reader of the governement decisions which made increased the censorship possible. They somehow happen in silence—which is anything but the opposite of our world where every word let alone decision is critiqued by all sides to the nth degree. Any government decision which would hamper freedom of speech would be sure to receive uproar—uproar a journalist like the main character would surely hear of.

I guess this is all a long way of saying the setting of South is not represented with enough rigor. As we see in We, Nineteen Eighty-four, A Handmaid's Tale and others, more background info is needed to cement what makes the dystopia a dystopia, and in turn to empathize with the main character's plight.

Before closing the review, the last item to take issue with is the style of South. It's simple. If you told me a high schooler wrote the book, I would believe you. A thesaurus lacks. Diction and syntax are plain and straightforward. The book is entirely short, declarative sentences with no lexical range. It's not my idea of nuanced minimalism. William Gibson is, however. The reader can tell a sophisticated mind is at work behind his lines due to the balance of precision and brevity. With South it's tough to make that argument. If avant garde literature has dipped to this point, it's at least good news things can't get less sophisticated.

In the end, South is a sparse political dystopia that struggles to build an identity. Lakghomi's prose is intentionally spare, which does have the effect of keeping things simple and focused, but it's simple to the point the reader only partially builds a relationship with the book. With minimal character detail and minimal socio-political backdrop, the only thing they can really hang their hat on are the in situ struggles of the main character's descent. This is accomplished in about 100 pages. I normally laud minimalism on this blog: the gods are aware of the amount of bloat out there. But this novella is a clear case where more effective detail would have allowed it to pack a punch. It's a weak jab as things stand...