The Emergency

A Novel

By: George Packer

Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown

George Packer’s gripping fable of imperial collapse illuminates the crises of our times.

George Packer’s bestselling nonfiction work exploring American life has won many prizes, including the National Book Award. With The Emergency, he turns to fiction, bringing us a visionary novel that goes to the nerve center of what it means to live in a time of fracture and upheaval.

An empire has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. In the Emergency that follows, youth rebellions of urban Burghers and rural Yeomen embrace radical new ideas of humanity. Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family—from his wife, Annabelle, who finds fulfillment in their changed community; and especially from his teenage daughter, Selva, who has turned against her father’s values. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin’s disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.

The Emergency is an un-putdownable audiobook of ideas. It asks what we owe each other across divided generations and classes—what common human bonds remain when a society falls apart. In creating a vividly imagined world, Packer takes us deep into the heart of our troubled moment.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Critic reviews

Advance Praise

“A propulsive Orwellian novel . . . Packer writes with spare elegance and mounting urgency, and while the depictions of rising class and intergenerational conflicts have clear parallels to real-world matters, the novel never loses its taut dramatic edge. It’s a knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In this pivot to fiction, Packer is still preoccupied with the end of empire; it’s just that here he imagines a richly detailed adventure for a father and daughter through the jagged remnants of a society that’s already crumbled.”
—Bloomberg

“George Packer’s robustly imagined political parable is at once a gripping adventure and a vivid portrait of a family riven by a changing world. The Emergency is moving, urgent—and indelible.”
—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies

Praise for George Packer

“Packer’s strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to marshal a diverse range of voices from across the class divide, in a nation deeply divided by social status.”
—J.P. O’Malley, NPR

“Packer’s gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Packer’s is an American voice of exceptional clarity and humanity . . . When our descendants survey the ruins of this modern imperium and sift its cultural detritus, American voices like this will be the tiny treasures that endure.”
— David Goldblatt, The Independent

“Packer’s courage [is] the closest we have to Orwell’s.”
—Charles Kaiser, The Guardian

Ambitious but incomplete. Spoilers.

There are two crucial things missing from this otherwise strong depiction of the complex interlocking factors behind a civilization's decline.

The first is state violence. There are no police and no army. Why is written off as they all discarded their uniforms and fled. This doesn't make sense in a very basic way. There is entirely too much money and power wrapped up in a state military for it not to matter. Someone would keep it in working order if only to have it as tool for their own ends. Additionally, the ideological capture of the military is a crucial step in any revolution or coup. It is possible to convince a state's military to not engage in a defense of the state. It's not plausible for it not to exist. And unfortunately, a lot hangs on these absences.

The painless conquest by Togetherness of The Empire as a neo-Communist Youth Movement characterized by suicidal levels of empathy wouldn't be plausible after a brutal civil war. But without the brutal civil war the idea of Togetherness not merely proliferating among the energetic and conformist but both _not_ taking power and being influential enough to fill the rotted-out core of The Empire's ideals is just unbelievable. Instead, a 3-day siege of The City By The River that happens offscreen is the sum of it. And why this is done is transparent: this story is fiction story as structure for a thought experiment. And not a bad one.

Packer does an excellent job exploring and skewering every perspective and cultural tradition in The Empire while also populating them with plausibly rounded out people. Nobody is a parody, which is more than can even be said for Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is humanity in absolute excess in every person.

But too much doesn't make sense if a military can at all intervene and particularly when the Yeoman revolt begins. A shitapult is just not a tank. A deranged neo-traditionalist youth militia of a few dozen is not an at division of mechanized infantry. Any empire worthy of the name -and ironically The Empire really isn't- even moments before it's decline had a massive army -the cost of use of which usually fundamental to the empire's collapse- poised against foes within and without. But again, if the founders of Together had to stagger out of a hellstorm of bullets and shrapnel before beginning their reign of extreme tolerance they wouldn't begin with patient and compassionate lessons about "Why Pronouns Matter" instead of waves of public execution.

The second thing missing are those imagined Founders. Who created Togetherness? Some The Empire version of Noam Chomsky? There is no-one, and this absence is a flaw. Without it the basis of Togetherness is apparently just Social Media but in a world without Social Media. How did it spread? Who propagated it? Who convinced the desperate and yet deeply naive youngsters to rise up against their parents? Oh but again this is why there is no military. Not because they couldn't win, but because being sheltered and entitled is crucial to the heart of Togetherness's radical doctrines. It's painless, or at least promises to be, which is crucial to a revolution whose essential corps are upper class children. Their absence of real-world experience is what sustains their passion.

Again, this is a problem because it's a narrative not an essay about a hypothesis. And not a bad one, and clearly the lack of intellectual depth to Togetherness and it's tenets like "You Shall Be As Gods" is important. "Listen to the Young" also makes for a strong example of its vacuity given that "The Young" are encouraging "Listening" through a network of informers and secret police.

(Credit to Packer for understanding and including one of the greater terrors of Totalitarianism with Togetherness being enforced entirely without actual laws. That's really how it works: Stalin didn't order roundups and executions because of actual law-breaking and neither did Saddam Hussein. In the Dictator's land the crime is unimportant and largely fictional; punishment is the actual point. In The Empire shame and social pressure -"consequence culture"- is the rod and staff of Togetherness. That these things are so effective also illustrates the enfeebled fragility of The Empire's elites, and that's great writing.)

But in the end the climax is a civil war, and it's not menacing it's pathetic. Neither side has any real force. Not that victory for one won't spell mass suffering for the other but that -again- without a military neither force is credible. This is also somewhat hand-waved-away as being a consequence of The Empire being vaguely like most of modern Europe. Firearms are in short supply. Except of course IRL Europe there are still depots of Men With Guns and what they do or don't do during a revolution is important.

Oddly Packer did write himself a solution and perhaps forgot about it. In a not-far-gone yesteryear The Empire started a war with a neighboring state and lost. It seems to me the final act should be at least facing the prospect of The Empire's collapse leading to its pending conquest by a rival state instead of furious shitapult-versus-stakebed-truck action. This again circles back to the problem of Togetherness forming from thin air. Echoing the Bolsheviks having Togetherness be at least funded and supported by this unnamed hostile state would solve at least that problem. This does happen, and it does work. This is happening right now, in our actual world.

For all that The Emergency only gets 3/5 from me. What it does well it does incredibly well. How complete and complex the characters are is genuinely impressive. Everyone is flawed, everyone is remarkably talented. But the world building is incomplete and worse implausible. The ignorant fury of the Yeoman is compelling, but they aren't a credible threat. Togetherness is a solid model of an all-heart-no-brains social media revolution, but it succeeds without enough friction. Why that is isn't hard to work out: it has to manifest with enough velocity to irresistible but without enough fury to trigger concern in an otherwise quite docile population. Yet having an elite university social sciences core being the ones indoctrinating all the bourgeoise children who become the vanguard of Togetherness would fill out that absence.

Again, this is a thing happening right now in every culture who can read my review in English. We are all The Empire. Packer knows of which he speaks.

But for all that The Emergency is crippled by its limitations. I won't moan about a wasted Audible credit because it's hardly the worst audiobook I've ever bought, and I'll listen to it another time or two. But not more than that. This book is probably better as a primer for its imagined scenario then for anyone seriously following recent political history. Or to put it another way: the less the reader already knows the more The Emergency will probably blow their mind.