Kay Dick’s They is a forgotten dystopian novel from 45 years ago, but still contentious in an age of
Social Media bullyingA parcel arrives, inside which is a copy of Kay Dick’s dystopian novel of 1977, They: A Sequence of Unease, and a letter informing me that Faber is to reissue it next month. Crikey, but isn’t this amazing? Dick, who died in 2001, is something of a minority interest at this point. She didn’t write much and what she did is either quite peculiar or quite bad, though I’ll always be fond of Ivy and Stevie, a collection of interviews with Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith that wears its eccentricity like some crazy hat (“I realised that she had lovely legs because, quite often, she would delve under her skirt for her handkerchief, which she tucked into her knickers,” Dick writes of the former, on whom she first “called” in 1950.)
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But if this book’s reappearance is surprising, it’s also ironic. In They,
Britain is in the grip of a mercilessly cruel group of philistines: a mob that burns books and paintings, punishing all those who resist. Faber hopes, very laudably, to bring it to a “new generation” of readers and to help it do so, its edition comes with praise from Margaret Atwood and an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.