Wool by Hugh Howley
Wool maps Juliette’s journey from a restrictive community, known as the silo, to the relative freedom of the outside world. Author Hugh Howey has created an enticing series of science fiction novellas that force the reader to question every scrap of information they are given along the way.
Life inside the silo operates on very few supplies. This means that every birth demands a death, and that who is to be trusted is always uncertain. The air outside the silo is toxic, but to escape is to be free. So what happens when you can no longer trust the images presented to you, when you begin to poke holes in seemingly unequivocal truths, and when the decisions you make have the ability to destroy lives? What would you choose?
As the point of view shifts between Juliette and those around her, we are able to slowly piece together the complex nature of the silo and its community.
Sheriff Holston begins the novel by expressing a desire to go outside. Yet we quickly learn that this wish is an effective death penalty: inhabitants who venture beyond the silo are fitted with a suit that provides them with a limited oxygen supply and, when that supply runs out, they are left to die there. However, they are still expected to do their duty to society, cleaning the lenses that give the silo a view of the external world – an idyllic scene of rolling green hills and clouds stretched across bright blue skies, as well as, gruesomely, the decaying bodies of previous cleaners. This process, known as ‘cleaning’, creates a string of complications for Mayor Jahns, Juliette and all others who begin to see the truth.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking read that explores both the need to experience the outside world and our fears of what that world might hold for us. Wool will slowly draw you from the safe confines of your living room to an inexplicably secretive place, where questions of trust are constantly thrown up in the air in the search for truth.