The Ministry of Manners

As a bookish children’s writer, I’m always keen to read middle-grade novels that engage with canonical literary texts, and it feels like there have been many smart approaches to such material lately, from Nat Harrison’s The Girl Who Raced the World – a feminist version of Around the World in Eighty Days – to Maz Evans’ The Last Bard and Anna James’ Alice with a Why.

This rewriting of George Orwell’s 1984 for middle grade by David Solomons is in many ways a riskier concept, necessarily touching as it does with some extremely hot political issues about phones, surveillance, AI and book bans. But I’m pleased to say Solomons manages to pull it off, making this into a tense thriller that never lectures but raises some very serious questions about the world our children might want to live in.

It focuses on Alfie and Margot Hawthorne, who are growing up under the eye of the Ministry of Manners, and constantly watching their stock of ‘Courtesy coins’ go up and down. School is a place where everyone is either brainwashed or pretending to be – a dystopia in the tradition of Black Mirror, The Stepford Wives, and Gillian Cross’ excellent series The Demon Headmaster. But when Margot is taken to a rehabilitation camp and Alfie discovers his father is doing important work for the Ministry they must both fight for family and freedom.

I was particularly taken by the complicity of their father and mother in this nightmare of surveillance – my generation, after all, have been the first parents to track their children. I also loved the quiet heroism of the librarian, Mrs Finch, who is finally taken away in a van after slipping a forbidden copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to a pupil. And Hazem Asif’s stylised propaganda posters throughout are absolutely superb – both he and Solomons have huge fun with the slogans like: UNIFORMITY BEGINS WITH YOU! And: YOUR VOICE MATTERS WHEN IT AGREES. A bracing reminder that obedience is not a virtue.