The White Desert is an unusual debut novel by Luis López Carrasco, expertly translated by Rosalind Harvey. Odd, unsettling and dystopian, the novel starts with nine people fleeing bombs in a hot air balloon which is “deflating a little more with every second that passes”. A young man asks “What sort of bombs were they? Was it a nuclear attack? Biological?” while a young woman asserts that they must decide which one of them will jump into the sea so that the others can reach a desert island safely where a new civilisation can be established. The balloon’s passengers are the only survivors of a world war that has wiped out humanity. The twist in the tale is that this is just role play, coordinated by an HR woman. What is at stake is in fact an entry-level job in the books division of the Cultural Department Store, and not the future of the human race after all.
Although there is no linear narrative, the five interconnected stories have a common thread in the shape of the narrator, Carlo, whose partner, Aitana, eventually joins in. From an uncertain future, he remembers the world in which we all once lived and to which it is no longer possible to return now that we are well past the millennium, into the twenty-first century, and experiencing the end of traditional capitalism as it is replaced by a dehumanising, extractive system. The fragmented format of the book is like a series of film shorts which makes sense since Carrasco is a filmmaker as well as a writer.
Compliance and Denial vs. Discernment and Awareness
The second story focuses on Jimena, a friend of Carlos and Aitana. A flight from Dubai to Sydney has to make an emergency landing on a remote island after there is an explosion on board. The passengers survive with minor injuries, and completely surrender to the demands of the cabin crew instead of exploring the island.
The third story is set fifteen years after the job interview at the beginning of the book. Aitana remembers her first encounters with Carlos’s family and how his ageing father is bemused by a rapidly changing Spain. Tired of teaching and his vice-deanship, he decides to go back to his original post at the hospital, but thirty years on everything has degraded. “Carlos thought that the contemptuous, obstinate, condescending way their teachers had behaved would have disappeared after the dictatorship, but was instead horrified to see that his colleagues had in turn morphed into these moustachioed gods in white coats, mediocre and tyrannical.”
At a New Year’s Eve party Carlos’s old friends get together but it soon becomes clear that they have drifted apart as their career paths and lives have fractured. Their heavily judgemental party games have an unpleasant undercurrent. Ultimately, it is the emails from his brother living alone in their abandoned childhood family home, asking questions and reminiscing about a world that is slipping away, that illuminate the dark undercurrents eroding everyone’s lives.
Luis López Carrasco: Socio-Fiction for the Digital Age
Carrasco frames modern melancholy as a symptom of an unstable world where compliance is a dangerous illusion of safety. He updates Orwell’s control and Huxley’s distraction for today’s hyper-digital capitalism, capturing this landscape in a surreal, reality-bending “otherwhere”.
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