Night Witches

I’m starting to feel as if I’ve read enough dystopian fiction to last me all future lifetimes. But I’ll make a willing exception for anything by L J Adlington, an author who has made something of a speciality of weaving real historical threads into the imagined worlds of her futuristic novels.

In her classy new thriller, Night Witches, our teenage heroine is Rain Aranoza, a teenage bomber pilot from Rodina, a nation ruled by the all-seeing, all-knowing Aura, and founded on an absolute belief in science and fact. Religion, superstition and the belief in witches is strictly outlawed. As a consequence, Rodina finds itself at war with the Crux, a nation of believers where God and nature are celebrated and worshipped.

Flying ace Rain courageously sets herself to one perilous flying perilous mission after another, brushing aside both her growing feelings for the most unsuitable Reef, a young Scrutiner; and an uncanny sense that she is somehow different. For Rain can forsee the manner of death of anyone whom she touches. For a time, she manages to keep her head down, according to her father’s maxim: The weed that sprouts up gets yanked out.  But as the enemy begins to prevail, she is forced to acknowledge her powers, and work out how best to use them.

This is a complex novel which draws you into a world which feels both imaginatively strange, and absorbingly familiar in these days of intense debate about ‘God delusions’. Night Witches has a steely ambiguity at its heart which leaves us questioning who the real enemy is. The Crux, with their crusading zeal? Or the Aura, who mercilessly persecute believers?

Adlington also evokes a terrific sense of the camaraderie between Rain and her young fellow pilots. This, and the unsophisticated construction of the planes they fly made me think of Spitfires and a very British sense of derring-do against an enemy ideology. But as Adlington explains in her fascinating Afterword, her inspiration actually came from WWII Russia, and the first women every to fly combat missions.

There are echoes of Hunger Games et al here. But amid all the futuristic flying, Night Witches is also gratifyingly grounded, both in the here and now, and in recent military history. And for pulling off that difficult fusion of dystopias, I heartily applaud it.