Exodus from the City: Peter Dickinson's Eva

From the days of Dickens on, British fiction about or for children has seldom shown the city as a place where satisfactory childhoods can be experienced. Fictive London children escape from their urban environment to cozy exurbs like the one that welcomes Oliver Twist or fantasy realms such as the Pevenseys’ Narnia or the Darlings’ Neverland. Romantic considerations position children in nature, seldom portrayed as “red in tooth and claw” for young readers but more likely the enchanted rurality of a country house’s park or garden, as in Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series. If not nature, writers may endorse the “it takes a village” mentality and focus on the small community of a boarding school. Perusing the list of Carnegie Medal winners since the award’s inception in 1937 suggests that for the twentieth-century British sensibility, urban life and juvenile well-being are somehow essentially incompatible. When we examine novels set in the century yet to come, cities are hostile to all human life. They loom as frightening repositories of our intractable problems: crowding, crime, pollution, alienation, out-of-control technology, and human arrogance.

One of the more disturbing images of the city springs to life in Peter Dickinson’s 1988 novel for young adults, Eva. Confined to her hospital bed after a horrific automobile accident, the symbolically named Eva Adamson can manipulate an overhead mirror to give herself a view from the hospital’s windows. She sees

highrise beyond highrise, far into the distance, all rising out of mist, the familiar, slightly brownish floating dawn mist that you always seemed to get in the city at the start of a fine day. She must be a long way up in a highrise herself, she could see so far. Later on, as the city’s half-billion inhabitants began to stir about the streets the mist would rise, thinning as it rose, becoming just a haze. (8)

The idea of a half-billion inhabitants strikes a late-twentieth-century reader as virtually incomprehensible; and later, when an apartment is described as “a good kilometer in the air” (151) one wonders how a city, at least as we currently understand the phenomenon, can consist of such structures and such a population.

Dickinson slowly reveals other details of his futuristic city: “Most people stayed in their rooms all day, just to get away from one another. A lot of them never went out at all. Their world was four walls and their shaper zone” (14). Marcus Crouch’s review of Eva in The Junior Bookshelf comments on the “shaper,” defining it as “a development of TV which not only gives shape to every concept but also shapes the minds and lives of all who come under its influence.” The most recent advances in virtual reality may give nineties readers a detailed sense of what Dickinson was imagining when Eva was written in 1988. In Eva the shaper provides a substitute for all that humanity is in the process of giving up—nature, travel, interaction, intimacy, and experience. In such a world of detachment, Professor Adamson warns his daughter, “The shaper companies were the real rulers of the world. The people told them what they wanted and the companies gave it to them and nothing else mattered” (14).

With all habitable spaces occupied, urban planners have cynically left the beaches and the snow peaks for those people willing to brave the congestion in the air and on the streets, acknowledging, “there wasn’t a lot else you could do with them” (40). Restricted space imposes an enormous need for control, so City Guidance Systems steer cars through traffic. At the beginning of the novel, the city has been Eva’s world, a world she accepts, “It was as if you were born used to it, the clamor and the jostling, people, people, people. They were the air you breathed, the sea you swam in” (76).

But, as Eva’s name suggests, she will be mother of a new race in a new world. When the story opens, the reader discovers along with the slowly awakening...