The Biggerers

Amy Lilwall

OneWorld

Otago Daily Times, October 6th 2018

Every so often I have the pleasure to review a book that stands out from the crowd for its originality and/or the beauty of its writing. British author Amy Lilwall’s debut novel, The Biggerers, impresses on both counts.

Set a hundred years from now, Lilwall’s imagined world is incrementally rather than revolutionarily different to today. Printed books are obsolete, self-driving cars ubiquitous, and the human lifespan has been extended into the mid-hundreds, but many aspects of life are fundamentally the same. The most obvious change is that, rather than cats or dogs, many people have ‘Littlers’, Barbie-sized beings intended to encourage empathy and nurturing instincts in the young and companionship to the childless and elderly.

Despite their superficial similarity to miniature humans, Littler’s status is carefully ambiguous: they are ‘adopted’ by their owners but are legally ‘products’ that can be recalled if they develop defects or their terms of sale are breached. Since they are not animals, they are to be given coats for winter, but not clothes because they are not people and, most importantly, their intellectual development and ability to communicate is artificially inhibited because it would be unethical to demote a ‘verbally capable’ being to the role of pet.

Similar niceties surround their production, which circumvents prohibitions on cloning and embryo modification by genetically engineering fully differentiated cells prior to returning them to a pluripotent state.  But most people just enjoy their ‘mute but cute’ companions and don’t bother themselves with difficult questions about their provenance or identity.

For Jinx and Bonbon, the Littlers whose story forms the heart of the novel, life is initially simple and predictable. They wake up and get out of their basket. They kick their food bowl until the She-one comes and fills it with Flake. They spend the day playing around the house or Outside with their friends Chips and Blankey. In the evening the She-one makes noises at them, gives them Flake, then makes smells that she and the He-one eat before going into the big room. If they are in the mood, Bonbon goes in and gets it. Then Jinx. Then they go to sleep.

The only thing that differentiates one day from another is whether they collect feathers, AstroTurf, rocks, or string to line their basket. But as time progresses they begin to experience new thoughts, ideas and feelings: Why do the He-one and the She-one eat with spoons while they have to eat with their hands? Why does Jinx cry (and Bonbon doesn’t)? What would it feel like to do the Big Cuddle with Chips? Even the noises their He-one and She-one make start to make sense, as if there is an old Littler in their head explaining the words they don’t know.

Then their She-one, Susan, teaches Bonbon to clap once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’, a direct contravention of the no communication clause in the sales contract, and the pair are recalled to by the company that produced them for ‘adjustment’. Here they meet a variety of other defective Littlers, all of whom are determined to regain and retain their memories of who they are, while Susan joins a group of owners who, like her, have come to consider their small companions as rather more than pets and are determined to rescue them.

Comparisons to The Borrowers are inevitable, but this is not a story for children and Lilwall writes with a surety and nuance that would be the envy of many well-established authors. The story is told from multiple points of view, both Littlers’ and ‘full human’, and beautifully paced. Details of time, place and the relationships between characters are revealed incrementally as the novel progresses, with the reader knowing no more than the narrators themselves.

The ethics of deliberately circumscribing Littlers’ cognitive ability for commercial gain – not to mention the arbitrary differentiation between people and non-people based on the ability to speak – are clearly presented but do not dominate the storytelling and leave the reader plenty of scope to extend such considerations to other animals too.

Thought provoking, moving and thoroughly entertaining, The Biggerers is my book of the year so far.