Facial Justice

L. P. Hartley

Sept. 2014 · Penguin UK

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'The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy...'

Jael 97's good looks have been deemed a cause of discontent among other women, and she finds herself reporting to the Ministry of Facial Justice, where her face will be reconstructed to become 'beta' (second-grade). For she lives in a post-apocalyptic world, where society is based on a collective sense of guilt, where all citizens are labelled 'delinquents' and obliged to wear sackcloth and ashes. Individuality and privilege, which might arouse envy, are stamped out.

But Jael refuses to fit in. Forced to become 'beta', and thus exempt from envy, her self-respect and rebellious spirit cannot be suppressed so easily. Slowly, she begins the struggle to reassert the rights of the individual.

L. P. Hartley's dystopian classic is a darkly entertaining vision of human weakness, envy and governmental interference taken to their most chilling extremes.

Autoren-Profil

Leslie Poles Hartley was born in 1895 and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. He is best known for Facial Justice, the Eustace and Hilda trilogy and The Go-Between, which won the Heinemann Foundation Prize in 1954 and whose opening sentence has become almost proverbial: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' He was appointed a CBE in 1955, having won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in addition to the Heinemann. He died in 1972.