The Method

by Juli Zeh

Paperback, 2012

Status

Available

Call number

833.92

Genres

Publication

Harvill Secker (2012), 240 pages

Description

The government knows your medical data, your sleep patterns and exercise is mandatory. Good health is your highest civic duty. But what happens when you rebel against this controlling regime? Mia Holl lives in a state governed by The Method, where good health is the highest duty of the citizen. Everyone must submit medical data and sleep records to the authorities on a monthly basis, and regular exercise is mandatory. Mia is young and beautiful, a successful scientist who is outwardly obedient but with an intellect that marks her as subversive. Convinced that her brother has been wrongfully convicted of a terrible crime, Mia comes up against the full force of a regime determined to control every aspect of its citizens' lives.

User reviews

LibraryThing member SChant

Quite well-written but didactic and lacking an engaging story.
The SF element is a barely sketched pretext for musings on personal liberty and public responsibility. I found it dull.

3 more

LibraryThing member jrak

I wish that this book about ideas was better crafted. It's a great idea, but there are too many speeches and not enough world building to make this really work. I'm not sure of the politics of the author. Are we supposed to side with anarchist beliefs of the brother, or not? It isn't clear in the

end.

Show Less

LibraryThing member verenka

August book club read. It's a speculative fiction novel set in the future where all illnesses have been made extinct and health and hygiene are valued above all and monitored by the government. The programme for health and hygiene is called "the method" and encompasses everything. The main

character ignores the rules, talks to invisible friends and gets into trouble big time. The ending is the absolute mind fuck and pretty brilliant, if depressing, but that's how I prefer my endings.

Show Less

LibraryThing member adpaton

Part political thriller, part crime story and part speculative fiction, The Method is a futuristic system designed to ensure people are healthy and pain free and, by the mid 21st Century, it’s not optional: maintaining physical health is a virtue, and failure to do so is a crime.

Mia Holl’s

brother was an anarchist who rebelled against the super-scrubbed and fascistic nanny state: when he was convicted – on the basis of DNA evidence – of the rape/murder of a girlfriend, Mia was convinced he was framed.

She tries to avenge him by bringing down the state but is arrested as a subversive: there are no soft answers or easy solutions in this well imagined and plausible tale of sanitary neurosis.

Show Less

Fewer