United By Pop received a free copy of We See Everything in exchange for an honest review, all opinions are our own.
Title: We See Everything
Author: William Sutcliffe
Purchase: Available in the UK and the US
Overall rating: 4/5
Great for: Fans of Brian Conaghan, Marie Lu, and George Orwell
Themes: young adult, coming-of-age, dystopian, science fiction and war
Review: “This is what’s left of London, a seething spine of overcrowded land shaped like a sticking plaster, cut off from the rest of the world, these days often just called The Strip.”
Near future, London is war-ravaged and bombed-out. Its skyscrapers are nothing more than twisted chunks of metal that scratch at a sky filled with drones. Its parks are lined with the makeshift houses of the homeless. Its inhabitants are the starving, hopeless shells of the people they once were.
For Lex, this is the only existence he has ever known. For his father, it is a stark difference from his own boyhood memories of life. This shared yearning for the past conjures a desperation in the people and a resistance is formed in the hopes of allowing the next generation a future not so bleak as their present.
Alan is a trainee drone pilot whose dream is to end the lives of the terrorists that would see the current order of life turned to chaos. He is weary of being overlooked and forgotten, and his new passion gives his life the purpose he didn’t know he was yearning for.
The characters of this story may never meet, but their lives are about to intertwine in a way neither ever thought imaginable.
I was plagued with questions whilst reading this. The world was both familiar and yet so strange that I constantly wondered what had occurred to transform it to its future state of destruction. The war is discussed in passing and yet never fully explained. The terrorists’ hopes for the future are hinted at but their actions are never developed. The drones keep a constant vigil over the city’s inhabitants but it is never explained why they do so.
The reasoning behind much of the activity was never provided for the reader, which I found initially jarring. Soon, however, I was lost in this world and I believe this lack of explanation might have been a conscious decision by Sutcliffe.
Through the split perspective of both Alan and Lex, the reader is invited to view this world from two very alternative perspectives. Their dreams for the future drastically oppose and without being provided with why exactly that came to be, it is left for the reader to decide which side they abide with. The good and bad of this novel are confused, and arguments for both the government’s control of the citizens and the terrorist’s opposition to this can supported.
It is not until the novel’s final terrifying ordeal that I realised where my own feelings lay. Being allowed the time to come to this decision myself gave me a deeper empathy for the characters on the opposing side, as well as a more heartfelt response to the actions that led to my decision.
This fictional Big Brother state of ‘We See Everything’ is set in a recognisable landscape to fully explore the reader’s opinions on the matter of human rights and the seemingly all-seeing eyes of authority. The fascinating terrain exposed both sides of this complex coin and allowed the reader’s own emotions to cleverly influence their interpretation of the ending of this explosive dystopian novel.
