The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

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The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist is an intriguing insight into a world where dispensable people must give themselves over to medical science for the good of society.

My Book Review Rating: 6 stars – this novel will make think about how you value yourself and the people around you and the price you place on your freedom.

When I picked up the press release for The Unit I almost put the book to the bottom of my review pile – a previous reviewer had described it as: “Orwellian horrors in Xanadu on Xanax – creepily profound and most provocative.” Talk about putting me off as a reader! But I picked it up, and I’m glad I did, for this is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read (hence the elusive 6 star rating). And actually – now I’ve read the book – that description is pretty accurate!

The novel is written from the perspective of Dorrit Weger, a childless writer who lives alone with her dog and is close to the poverty line. On her 50th birthday she is taken to a special unit – a reserve unit for biological material – where she must live out the rest of her life. These units have been set up to cater for dispensable people – women aged 50 and men aged 60 – who are childless or don’t have a job which contributes to society. These people don’t have anyone who loves or needs them and aren’t considered useful to society, so they serve the community by undergoing various tests and studies – imagine animal testing performed on people. Eventually they donate organs to the needed citizens – those who are loved, raise children and contribute to the economic growth of society – who need organs from healthy bodies to survive.

The unit itself is a beautiful facility, with shops and restaurants, a fitness facility and a huge winter garden and the dispensables are well looked after and are encouraged to forge relationships with their peers.

This novel is beautifully written from the perspective of Dorrit and is a rich and riveting read – it also prompts many questions. What value do we place on our lives and the lives of others? Are those people who choose to raise children really the only worthy people in society?

The Unit has echos of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – though I much preferred this novel. If you are looking for ideas for your book club then you should definitely add this to your list; I suggest you stock up on snacks before your meeting though as I suspect the issues and questions raised by Holmqvist could fuel hours of discussion!

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Book Description
One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation. Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and…well, then what?

The Unit is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care.

A Q&A with Ninni Holmqvist
Question: The Unit is not set in the present, but its echoes of present-day issues are clear and ominous. Describe the world of The Unit.

Ninni Holmqvist: The Unit is a dystopia set in a near future. It is about people who don’t have any children or anyone else who loves them and need them, and who aren’t useful to the society in any other way either. These people are called “dispensable,” and they are picked up at their homes at a certain age (women at 50, men at 60) and taken to special units (“reservbanksenhet” in Swedish) for biological material, where they are supposed to serve the society through participating in various tests (like animal testing but made on people), but also, eventually, by donating organs to those of the society’s needed citizens—the ones who produce and raise children, the loved ones, the ones who contribute to the economic growth—who are afflicted with severe illnesses and need organs from healthy bodies to survive. Dorrit Weger, who just turned 50, is one of those dispensable. She is a writer, childless, quite poor, and lives alone with her dog. The story begins with her arrival at the unit, an establishment/institution she immediately finds a lot more comfortable and human and loving and beautiful than she ever could have expected.

Question: The Unit raises a number of complex—and sometimes disturbing—ethical questions. Do you see the novel as having a central moral theme?

Ninni Holmqvist: The book is above all written as a critique of society and the way political leaders today see everything in figures and numbers. But my aim was also to raise questions like: What is freedom? What is human dignity? How do we humans value our selves and each other? But The Unit is also very much a story about love (Dorrit meets the love of her life at the unit, a man called Johannes, and she also, miraculously, gets pregnant) and friendship and loyalty.

Question: Who did you write The Unit for? Did you have someone—personally, or in society—that you intended the story for?

Ninni Holmqvist: My intention was that it is for everyone. But I guess it might especially appeal to middle-aged single people, childless ones. But also people who are in or are close to other categories of “dispensable” people: disabled people for instance, long time unemployed persons, culture workers. And people who are critical of capitalism and economism. Perhaps also people who don’t mind being provoked.

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Chilling, and possibly a new modern classic

Review Date: June 8, 2009

Reviewer: E. Thayer, Mishawaka, IN USA

The near-future world Ninni Holmqvist has created is horrifyingly realistic, and entirely possible. We follow the main character, a somewhat sad and empty Dorrit, through her shocking entry and assimilation into the Second Reserve Bank for Biological Material. The author deftly creates a joint experience between reader and Dorrit as she gradually becomes inured to the horrors awaiting her life as a human test subject. Over the course of the novel, the cumulative death and inflicted illness is presented in gradual, almost unnoticeably normalized degrees, until by the very end one might understand how perfectly rational sacrificing for the greater good of all can seem, when divorced from the spirit, inner life and suffering of those affected. And there, it is where Holmqvist shows her real talent, in underscoring the dangers of applying exterior measurements of merit to human life.

Holmqvist has possibly created a modern classic, and Marlaine Delargy has done an outstanding job of translation. Anyone with even an ounce of empathy in their soul will find this story by turns wrenching, chilling, and thought-provoking. Being a typical American, I would have liked a stronger ending, that played more into the sense of story with an emotionally comforting resolution -- but perhaps the lack of that contributes to an extended raw wariness intended by the author. A neat, wrapped-up ending might let us mentally file the story away... "aha, it all worked out in the end." But the lack of that? It keeps us emotionally and mentally engaged past the end of the novel, and past the end of Dorrit's story.

Comparisons are sure to be made between "The Unit" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Readers who enjoy one, are sure to enjoy the other. They are both eminently readable, well-written pieces of literature, both deal with issues of control and oppression, and both have multiple layers of story and meaning to be explored. However Holmqvist has pushed past the theme of female-oriented oppression, and explored what it means to be oppressed in the name of the greater good, indiscriminate of sex.

"The Unit" is both enjoyable as a superficial read, and an extraordinarily current thinker. Highly recommended for all fiction readers.

Can you hold your breath for an entire novel?

Review Date: June 23, 2009

Reviewer: G. M. Arnold, Palo Alto, CA USA

This novel had an odd effect on me. I found that I was holding my breath. Not for fear of what might happen next, but because I felt as though I was holding a bubble in my hands, and that any sudden movement would cause it to pop. Or I was holding a jagged piece of broken glass, and I might cut myself. The point is, this novel took me to a strange place, where things were not as they seemed, where the rules has been rewritten, and where death and disappearance was always a moment away. It's not horrifying - that is, the emotion produced is not horror. Or perhaps this is what horror looks like when it's institutionalized and renamed.

This is a wonderful novel, filled with love, loss, friendship, and insight. It will make you think, which is good (if not always comfortable).

Chilling portrayal of a future society; a remarkable novel

Review Date: June 11, 2009

Reviewer: S. McGee, New York, NY

Dorrit Weger is dispensable; she lives alone with her dog and no one relies on her. She has not created a new family unit or added 'value' to society in some other notable way and so, as she turns 50, she is collected in a minivan and driven off to the Unit of the book's title. A cross between a retirement community and experimental medical center, her new home is comfortable, even luxurious, and for the first time in her life, Dorrit finds herself forming close relationships and even falling in love. She has become needed by others -- but she is still dispensable. And like all the Unit's inhabitants, over the coming years, she will participate in a range of human experiments, from the relatively benign (how does intense exercise affect the body; is bonding with children inherent even among those who haven't had them) to the more intrusive -- she must donate one of her kidneys to a "needed" member of the outer community. And she, like all her new friends and her new lover, Johannes, knows that with each day that passes, the day of her 'final donation' -- of her heart, lungs or some other part of her body that she can't exist without to someone whom society decides is 'needed' -- will arrive. In the words of one of Dorrit's new friends, she is now living in a 'free-range pig farm'. The only difference, Elsa notes, is that pigs and hens are "hopefully -- happily ignorant of anything but the present."

This novel is a stunning achievement, an imaginative tour de force. Holmqvist has imagined every detail of a society that could dream up such a plan in the first place for women over 50 and men over 60, and then put her imagination to work once more to dream up the nature of the world these "dispensable" individuals find themselves inhabiting, from the bizarre alcohol-free cocktails to the eccentric librarian, from the replica of Monet's gardens of Giverny where it is always spring and summer (the unit is sealed under a vast dome that means Dorrit will never again see snow or feel the wind in her hair or on her face) to the astonishing array of amenities.

At first, Dorrit is assigned to a relatively harmless experiment, so it is only slowly that she fully absorbs the magnitude of what lies ahead for her. She notices a man asleep in a chair in a library -- only later does she realize the reason he has fallen asleep is because the medication he's taking is causing him to do so. Her friend, Alice, is participating in a hormone study and developing an Adam's apple. In the sauna one day, she encounters six women. "They all had one or more scars from surgery ... Two of the women had distorted, swollen joints, their movements slow and jerky, as if their whole body ached."

As with all great dystopian books, it is sometimes what lies between the lines -- the assumptions of the dystopian society -- that are the most chilling. Dorrit notes, in an offhand manner, that women who become pregnant over the age of 40 are automatically encourage to abort the fetus; these children are more likely to have birth defects and be a cost to society. "If the overall number of defects and complications can be reduced to a minimum, there are significant financial gains to be made." At the outset of this book, anyone trying to argue that Holmqvist's particular dystopia is the result of a particular political point of view run amok will have a hard time making their case. The society's attention to the group at the expense of the individual is certainly a hallmark of socialism; on the other hand, the emphasis on the need to create value, to form new family units (having a sibling doesn't make you indispensable, only having a child), is more capitalist in tone. Dorrit has rationalized her presence in the unit, as she explains to her shrink. All that matters is what she and others produce, and "life is capital; a capital that is to be divided fairly among the people." If she can't believe that, she says, then her existence in the Unit would be unbearable.

From the start, Dorrit has less trouble than she imagined getting used to life in the Unit, free of any financial concerns. On the other hand, most nights she dreams of walking along the beach near her home with her beloved dog, Jock, whom she had to give away to a nearby farm family. (The relationship between them, as portrayed by Holmqvist, is one of the most poignant and moving depictions of a human-animal 'friendship' I have ever read.) Then she discovers, to her astonishment, that her relationship with Johannes has resulted in a pregnancy. Suddenly, she finds herself facing a host of new decisions and her hard-won and very precarious peace vanishes. "I longed to go back to an age of ignorance," she muses, "before the heart lost its status and was reduced to just one of a number of vital but replaceable organs."

The discussion of what makes a person of value to society and what makes a life worthwhile is perhaps one of the key philosophical questions we all grapple with, and Holmqvist has found an unusual and creative way to explore those central themes of meaning and the inevitability of death. Perhaps it resonated so deeply with me because I could see myself in Dorrit's shoes -- childless and single, in her fictional dystopia I would be of no 'value'. As someone says to Dorrit, "You have simply lived your lives, without thinking too much of the future of the world around you." In the world of the Unit, that kind of lack of planning has consequences.

While both men and women are affected by the existence of the Unit, this is primarily a novel about women and women's relationships, with men and with each other. (In any event, men are granted an extra decade to make themselves 'indispensable!) Although the specific themes are very different, and the style and plot alike revolve less around anger, violence or even hostility (no one is dragged screaming to make their final donation), this reminded me somewhat of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Everyman's Library). The key similarity: both authors choose to base their dystopia on some fringe element in today's society that is clearly identifiable but hard to imagine reaching these extremes. In Atwood's case, it's Christian fundamentalism which has resulted in a theocracy; Holmqvist, meanwhile, focuses on the degree to which our society focuses on market values and society rather than the individual.

This is a haunting novel, one that it's hard to do justice to in any review. I found nearly impossible to put down until I had finished it and begrudged having to attend a work-related dinner about halfway through. I expect to re-read it many times over the years to come, to enjoy Holmqvist's simple and elegant prose as well as her imaginative plotting and characterization.

Highly recommended.