Living Hell

Allen and Unwin (2007)
ISBN:9781741148282
$16.95
Buy this Book
Back to Reviews page
Reviewed by Angela Slatter, June 2007

“You’ve lived your whole life in peace and safety. You think your future is all mapped out.

But then something goes horribly wrong.

You have to start running.

And suddenly your world will never be the same again.”

Forty-three years ago the spaceship Plexus with its cargo of almost fifteen hundred humans, left a petrochemically-scarred Earth, seeking a new world. The ship is a kind of huge travelling city, that meets all the needs of its human inhabitants – they are fed via food dispensers, are transported around the ship in On-board Transport Vehicles (OTVs), and governed by a Senate composed of leading citizens. The population is divided into A Crew and B Crew, alternatively working the ship and cryogenically frozen in shifts of four years (hence people are referred to as “Shifters”). Everyone knows they have, or will have, a job to do – from teen years every person is trained in some aspect of keeping Plexus running. Each individual is a ‘useful’ member of the society (medics, navigators, biologists, food technicians, computer whizzes, etc); all children are good citizens-in-training.

Life for the Plexus crews is highly regulated: clothes come in only four colours (red, navy, black and beige); the Brotherhood (and presumably Sisterhood) program ensures that children have a mentor in the form of an older Big Brother or Sister, and are themselves mentors for younger children; there’s a weekly allowance for sodas, etc, and even the water is enriched to be better for you; couples can have children only if the Senate grants ‘breeding rights’; seats adapt to each individual’s body (okay, that is a scientific advance!); and wristbands allow the ship to track everyone via their genetic code – it even alerts the medical staff if you’ve thrown up.

Jinks evokes the sense of place and culture extremely well and although there are a lot of acronyms (OTVs, RALs, CAIP, etc), you don’t feel you’re getting a lesson – it’s simply info passed on in the passage of the story, it’s never didactic. The science is there and evident, but never overwhelms the tale being told.

Seventeen-year-old Cheney is our first person protagonist, a member of A Crew; both his parents are Senate members. Cheney takes us through the world of Plexus: we meet his friends, his Little Brother (the gung-ho, chaffing-at-the-regulations, quite out-of-place, Dygall); his ‘crush’, Caromy; his Big Brother, Sloan (kind of like a hot, teen Mr Spock); his friend Merrit and her Little Sister, Inaret; and Yestin, the only kid to suffer Artificial Gravity Intolerance (AGI), who spends his hours making robot pets.

All in all, the society on the Plexus is so orderly, smugly bland and organised that it’s just asking for a disaster – after all, nature abhors a vacuum. The people onboard seem to have lost the will to fight if a situation seems unwinable, or if logic says that the odds aren’t in their favour. Their fighting spirit has burned low because life has been quite easy for them – the Plexus crew needs to learn how to fight to survive all over again. Sometimes a line like “We didn’t realise it was the beginning of the end of everything” (p.14) makes you think “Thank God”. Not in this case: Living Hell is an excellent read.

When the Plexus passes through an unidentified radiation cloud, everything seems okay for a few moments … until Cheney notices a kind of pink stain on the inside of the hull, a stain that spreads and spreads and spreads. Plexus comes alive – “This is organic life. This isn’t bacteria eating the hull, this is something else. This is a transformation” (p. 96). Metal becomes muscle, tissue, bone, membrane and the ship that was built to house and nurture human beings now registers them as an infection. Plexus’ body does all it can to defend itself: OTVs, Remote Laundry Units (RALs), shuttles, become the equivalent of leucocytes (white blood cells), seek out the infection and try to destroy it.

Cheney, his parents and a few other random survivors must find a way to stay alive and stop Plexus from wiping them out – of course, they can’t damage or injure the ship as it’s still their only means of transportation, sustenance, air, light, etc. Catch-22.

Jinks said she wanted to write a kind of Alien for kids, and she’s succeeded. The writing is tight, clean and precise, the pace and plotting are very well-managed, and the suspense is maintained throughout the book. The characters are generally well-written and well-rounded, very few stereotypes to be seen. The cover is cool with its manga-esque vibe (although a little creepy with the psycho-looking kid on the front). The only time I kind of ‘fell out’ of the story was when I read the line “Or maybe you can just, like, throw yourself into its mouth” (p.193) – at no point prior to this do any of the teenagers speak, well, like teenagers … and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a recessive Valley Girl gene had raised its head as social order crumbled. I could also have done with a few less “this is the end of the world, if only we’d known it” kind of lines – I know I’m watching the disintegration of a society and don’t need to be reminded. The ride is sufficiently riveting, so I’m already paying attention.

On the whole, I really enjoyed Living Hell – so much so, I am recommending it to my seventeen-year-old cousin for his consideration. I read it quickly, avidly, found no spelling mistakes, and at no point did I feel the urge to throw it against the wall. Thumbs up for Jinks. Her site is here http://www.catherinejinks.com/default.asp – go, look, enjoy.

“Life is a force that cannot be tamed.”