Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester's The Wall

John Lanchester's The Wall (2019) takes its titular border as a springboard from which to explore a number of territorial and temporal border themes, including the shifting boundaries of climate mobility and British border epistemologies. Following up on earlier works in which Lanchester investigates the ethical dimensions of societal crises, The Wall engages readers in a conversation about twenty-first century border issues that range from rebordering processes to environmental instability to global nomadism. Lanchester uses narrative techniques such as defamiliarization, plot reversal, and the narrator's emotional inaccessibility to project border themes onto the reader-text relationship and, in so doing, include readers in the bordering experiences. Shakespeare enters the scene as an intertextual interlocutor whose status as archetype of Britishness opens up a further heuristic dimension for exploring the epistemologies of British borders and for questioning the role of the nation-state in the age of the Anthropocene.