A Review of Wool by Hugh Howey
Why name a novel Wool?
Wool, wool. What wool? The cloth that’s itchy on sensitive skin? The fleecy covering
on sheep until they share it with us? Wool, like fuzzy heads or unshaved faces?
As it turns out, wool in Hugh Howey’s novel is the steel wool used to clean
camera lenses on a buried silo. A silo buried for life, for the living in some
post-apocalyptic world in which the descendants of survivors only have a
camera’s eye view of the outside world and that camera lens must be kept clean.
So wool, steel wool, is essential to this society. The title makes sense.
The opening line gets our attention with an opposition of
imagery and attitude. “The children were playing while Holston climbed to his
death…” The obvious dichotomy of playing children, full of life and dying creates
enough curiosity to engage the reader. The contrasts between living and dying
continues as Holston takes his time, moving up each step in a methodical and
ponderous way. He wears “old boots” as he climbs a metal spiral staircase,
paint chipped with age and metal floor worn so thin even the diamond no-slip
pattern is flatten by time and numerous footfalls. Holston punctuates this
difference as he reflects on how the sounds of “childlike delight” and youthful
nativity “who in their minds were not buried” are “incongruous with…his
decision and determination to die.” And we ask ourselves, why is he so
determined to die? Holston’s ponderings about what the “untold years had done,
the ablation of molecules and lives, layer and layer ground to fine dust” help
us empathize with Holston’s resignation borne of desperation.
Questions, pulled from reader with incongruities like laughing
children and death, are marvelous tools for writers and Howey uses them well. We
are engaged with Holston and this generationally buried society enough to read
the entire account. We learn about the importance of cleaning the outside
camera lenses, which needs to done every couple of years because toxic soot
builds up and clouds the exterior view. We also learn that the job is fatal.
The toxins in the air are still so powerful they deteriorate the chemical
safety suits in a matter of minutes and kill the “cleaner.” Criminals are
sometimes used to clean the lens, but at other times there are those who actually
volunteer for the job, like Holston does now…like his deceased wife did a year
ago.
Sheriff Holston was married to Allison, one of the few IT workers
in the silo. In this limited space, controlled environment procreation is only
permitted for couples who win the “lottery.” The lottery allows couples to attempt
to produce offspring for one year, then that privilege goes to another winning
couple. Holston and Allison won the lottery the year she volunteered for
“cleaning.” The laughing children remind him of what might have been, of the
child he and Allison might have had if not for the secret she learned while
recovering deleted computer files. However, as Holston learns, the secret
Allison thinks she discovered is not the real secret.
I highly recommend Wool
by Hugh Howey because he builds his setting with rich details and his
characters, though a bit stagnant, are engaging. You sympathize with the main
characters and feel their pain. We don’t learn a lot about Deputy Marnes or
Mayor Jahns in this first book, but we are deeply involved with Sheriff
Holston, Allison and a society living in a silo. It’s not an action-packed,
plot-driven escapism novella, but it does keeps moving with twists and turns
you don’t see coming. And it does move quickly along, taking us into a
dystopian world with rich texture and compelling traditions. We don’t get
answers to questions like, “what happen to create this mess,” but we are sucked
into the world of one man and his desperate reaction to the loss of a spouse
and the loss of hope.
I’ve only seen one drawback to Wool. It’s a free standalone novella in the Wool Series of five separate books. (Wool, Proper Gauge,
Casting Off, The Unraveling, The Stranded) It is part of the Silo Series which includes
the Shift Series (First
Shift: Legacy, Second
Shift: Order, Third Shift: Pact), plus the
final novel, Dust. It was free, so I can’t complain too much. And it did
pull me in enough to read the second book in the series, Proper Gauge. FYI enjoyed it too, and now I’m working on the third
book, Casting Off. More to come about
those books later. My only regret is that I bought the books individually and didn’t
go ahead and purchase the Wool Omnibus
Edition, which contains those first five books. Don’t make the same mistake I did!