When We Wake by Karen Healey is a young adult science fiction novel first published in Australia in 2013 and was, at the time, the author’s third book. I first heard of When We Wake when Sean Williams recommended it on Episode 203 of the Coode Street Podcast as an Australian science fiction book people should seek out and read. Karen Healey is actually a New Zealand writer, but Williams was right to recommend this as an Australian book. Healey has spent sometime living in Australia (though she has now returned to her home country), and it’s true that When We Wake reads like a distinctly Australian novel.
I mean this in two ways. Most obviously, the book isset in a future vision of Australia and by this virtue can be considered Australian science fiction. But interrelated with this obvious point is that the book extrapolates political and social issues that are particularly current in contemporary Australian society. Having said this, I am sure the issues she explores will resonate with readers more broadly.
The book’s protagonist is Tegan Oglietti, a sixteen-year-old girl of Italian heritage, living in 2027 Melbourne, where a hole in the ozone prevents her from walking outside without wearing SPF70 sunblock. Tegan’s father was a soldier killed in action on operations and she lives with her mother and brother Owen. Both Owen and Tegan are musicians and Tegan’s a Beatles fan (each of the book’s chapters takes its titles from a Fab Four song). Her favourite band member is Ringo Starr, though her own instrument of choice is the guitar.
Tegan is politically active, not necessarily because of her own social conscience, but because her best friend Alex, a social crusader, strongarms Tegan into joining in on protests, rallies and the like. Tegan is also motivated the spend time with her activist boyfriend, Dalmar, a friend of her brother who plays in his band. Tagging along with Alex and Dalmar, Tegan joins a rally on the steps of Parliament House. While listening to an address by the Prime Minister, she is shot and pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. Being a socially minded person, she has stipulated that in the event of her death her body should be donated to science. As a result, Tegan wakes in 2128, after being cryogenically frozen and revived as part of a military experiment.
Admittedly, the idea of a person disjointed in time as a result of cryogenic freezing is not an original idea in science fiction. However, Tegan’s voice is one of the strengths of the book, and her first person narration breathes new life and charm into an old trope. She has an endearing, deadpan and understated response to the incredible events that occur around her throughout the book – after the revelation that she has been frozen for over 100 years and her family and friends are all gone, she simply quips “It was kind of a lot to think about” (p.29). Not only is Tegan charismatic and intelligent, she is also a physically talented young woman – early in the novel it is established that Alex and her practice free running, breaking into abandoned buildings at night, to practice this art under blanket of darkness. But what makes Tegan a truly sympathetic character are her flaws; she often doubts herself, and she makes mistakes which complicates the plot of the book and in turn her relationship with other characters.
Many of the other characters are equally well developed and interesting: Marie, the well meaning biologist who takes Tegan in after she is revived; Bathari, a journalist hacker activist who is Tegan’s first new school friend in the 22nd Century; Joph, another school friend who is a pharmacist and drug dealer a little too fond of her own product; and Abdi, a Djiboutian refugee and fellow musician. On the other hand, some of the antagonists are a bit more thinly drawn. Both Colonel Dawson, Tegan’s military handler, and a man known as the Father, the leader of a fundamentalist religious group known as the Inheritors of the Earth, are particularly one-dimensional villains.
Healey’s political and social concerns in this book cover a lot of ground. Perhaps the novel is most fierce in its admirable examination of the way government immigration and border control policies can have a symbiotic relationship with fear and racism within societies. A No Migrant Policy, supported by lobby groups such as Australia for Australians, overshadows society in the future vision of Australia posited in When We Wake. The northern borders of Australia are guarded like a fortress and refugee camps are swollen with asylum seekers living in squalid conditions. Racism is not only rife in the broader community, but encouraged by the Government to help maintain popular support for their leadership. Anyone living in Australia today will find this science fictional extrapolation scarily plausible.
But Healey throws around a plethora of thematic concerns: religious extremism, environmental concerns, LGBT and transgender issues, the legalisation of illicit drugs, and very prominently, journalistic ethics, media culture and the cult of celebrity worship. Sometimes, the weight of all these worthy social issues becomes a bit too much for the writing to bear. After a particularly disastrous interview with a journalist about her celebrity status as the first successful cryogenic revival, Tegan’s army handler yells at her, “Truth! We didn’t need the truth! We needed a pretty face!” (p.186). This is not the most subtle writing, and admittedly there’s a very slight whiff of didacticism that pervades Healey’s treatment of her subject matter that seems, to me, can be common in young adult literature. However, for the most part it is heartening and admirable to see an author challenge her younger readership to think seriously about big issues.
While We Run takes some familiar science fiction tropes and combines them to tell a fast-paced adventure story that wears its heart on its sleeve. What it lacks in originality and subtlety in prose, it more makes up for with an endearing narrator, a commendable social conscience, and a distinctively Australian perspective. It has now been published worldwide and was followed by a sequel in 2014, titled While We Run. I hope to be reading that soon, as I enjoyed When We Wake a good deal.
When We Wake by Karen Healey
Published by Allan & Unwin, January 2013
291 pages
ISBN: 1742378080
Review by Luke Brown, February 2015
