it is also a failure.  The Army do not overthrow the Authority, they are defeated and imprisoned or killed.  However, the framing device of this novel, 'Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock' demonstrates an awareness of History as a part of the process of Utopia.  Kim Stanley Robinson (another SF author who views Utopia as a process rather that a destination articulates something similar in the middle section of Icehenge where evidence of a rebellion that almost succeeded serves to motivate and inspire a future generation.  Think too of our own history, on one level the Levellers, The Croppies etc failed in their aims, but their temporary gains and their example echoes down the generations.  On this level The Carhullan Army is a work of hope and therefore neither is it a dystopia.

It is also a novel of harsh, sometimes brutal realism balanced with tenderness and beauty.  Sister's welcome to the farm is at first violent, then compassionate, then extreme in its contrasts of torture and aid.  Sarah Hall demonstrates, as she has in her earlier novels, how women can match men in all respects, hard labour and emotional disengagement, agression and viciousness, and significantly, through Sister, how this might come about.  Sister's musings on Jacke quoted above prefigure Sister's own compromises, her drift from idealistic teen to paramilitary leader and defiant rebel doesn't feel forced at all.  Equally she has matched this with a cleverly thought out explanation of the slide into Totalitarianism by the state as well as by Jackie Nixon.  The social and political backstory is more than convincing, it is genuinely frightening.

For Cheryl Morgan this is a step back into 1970s feminism, for me it is a step on from there, taking separatism and dissecting it; analysing the ways in which men and women become alike; and neatly combining soft-spoken and strident to critique both.