BODY AND SOUL : Michael Paul Hogan reviews an impressive and surprising dystopian novel by Andrew Hook
Body and Soul
Andrew Hook
Elsewhen Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1-915304-81-0
232 pp £11.00
The traveller was tall. Taller than most. When he grinned it was clear his teeth were rotten: black holes in a universal smile. His arms extended from a jacket that was too small for him, as though they had been wrenched through with unnecessary force. In contrast, the ends of his trousers splayed over his shoes, were scuffed and grubby with dirt. He turned once, arms extended, taking in all of the adults and each of the children.
“My name is Book,” he said. “Let me tell you a story.”
Novels and stories charting dystopian futures have firmly established themselves as a major sub-genre of English and American fiction, running a fairly straight course from H G Wells to the author under review and taking in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Phillip K. Dick – plus myriad others – along the way. The majority, to be honest, I would not be bothered to read – let alone review. Like those streets in Istanbul where every shop sells exactly the same thing, the market is distinctly overcrowded. And yet once in a while a book comes along that extends the market rather than merely adding to it. Body and Soul, by the English writer Andrew Hook, is a rather beautiful example.
In an unspecified future, Earth has been anagrammed into Heart; an alternate world where the cities have been abandoned and the majority of the population live in small rural communities where they are self-sufficient and blissfully ignorant not only of the past but also of the world beyond their isolated settlements. Blissfully ignorant, yes – but there is a catch. To be born into, and accepted by, this new world both parents must be present at the birth of their child. The mother gives birth to the body; the father gives birth to the soul. If the father is not present, the child is born without a soul and is considered worthless – utterly worthless; unworthy of life. A shocking scene right at the beginning of the novel illustrates this. Calvin, our main character, agonisingly just misses being present at the birth of his child. The midwife, with chilling efficiency, murders the newborn she has just delivered. Welcome to the irony of a planet called Heart.
Not all these – quite literally “soulless” – children are immediately condemned. Cast adrift into the wilderness, some survive into adulthood, existing as zombies; mindless as well as soulless, feared and loathed by the occupants of any settlement they wander too close to. But they are not quite alone…
There are other wanderers too, self-imposed exiles who travel from village to village, telling stories around an evening fireside in return for some charitable food and maybe a night’s shelter before heading down the endless road to another brief encounter at another settlement. Another story; another (almost literally) captive audience; another return to perpetual solitude; another unknown destination (and potentially hostile reception) awaiting over the next horizon…
It is to be one of these that our hero, Calvin, still only a boy, but filled with a desire for knowledge beyond the narrow community that seeks to oppress him as it successfully oppresses all those around him, aspires. It is the traveller Book who fully opens the door to his inner mind, who recognises that he has “the Call,” that he has no real choice but to be a wanderer, and in so becoming must banish himself from friends and family forever:
“You want to know for yourself. You want to see for yourself. Because you are called.” Book paused. His breath could be discerned as a semi-transparent white smoke which temporarily coloured the night. “Your story is my story. I recognise you because I know you. Because I know me.”
Calvin threw him a question, knew the answer.
“Take me with you.”
Book turned, smiled. “Travellers travel alone.”
Calvin shrugged. “Always?”
“Always.”
I am not going to retell the story that Andrew Hook has so magnificently told. Even my precis of effectively the first 34 pages is, when I look back through it, inadequate to fully encompass the subtlety and tension of his prose – to say nothing of his enviable talent for character and dialogue. The subsequent 200 pages take us on Calvin’s journey; a journey that will encompass extreme dangers, unexpected romance, and a delightful interlude when Calvin discovers something entirely unknown to the people of the settlement he has abandoned – the sea! The cinematic, almost tactile, quality of Hook’s writing, sustained throughout the narrative to be sure, is particularly in evidence here. We are absolutely with Calvin, his girlfriend and their child, a four-year-old daughter, as they feel the sand beneath their feet for the first time and splash through these strange and wonderful water formations called waves…
But there is one encounter that I cannot advertise; an encounter so unexpected, so dramatically led up to, that I would do both author and reader a great disservice to reveal it here. Suffice to say that it will put everything in context and justify Calvin’s answering his “call” and abandoning his parents and his home to do so. It also, ironically, perfectly justifies the time we have vicariously spent as wanderers ourselves through the book’s pages. It is, in short, a revelation for Calvin and reader alike.
Hanif Kureishi, one of my favourite contemporary authors, who has never written a bad sentence and speaks great good sense about the art (and entertainment) of writing, has put on record: “After all, the aim of so-called creative writing is to give pleasure… This writing work is not therapy for the writer but entertainment for the reader.” The relevance of this to the book under review is that, on first reading, I didn’t just admire it as a piece of literature; I couldn’t (Oh, it sounds a ridiculous cliché, but it’s true!) stop turning the pages…
There are books, also films, that, to coin my own phrase, “transcend their genres.” Frankenstein is not a great horror novel; it’s a great novel. The Searchers is not a great western; it’s a great film. Likewise, Andrew Hook’s Body and Soul is not a fine work of science-fiction, but quite simply a fine piece of work. It deserves to be read.
Aug 5 2026
Body and Soul
BODY AND SOUL : Michael Paul Hogan reviews an impressive and surprising dystopian novel by Andrew Hook
Body and Soul
Andrew Hook
Elsewhen Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1-915304-81-0
232 pp £11.00
The traveller was tall. Taller than most. When he grinned it was clear his teeth were rotten: black holes in a universal smile. His arms extended from a jacket that was too small for him, as though they had been wrenched through with unnecessary force. In contrast, the ends of his trousers splayed over his shoes, were scuffed and grubby with dirt. He turned once, arms extended, taking in all of the adults and each of the children.
“My name is Book,” he said. “Let me tell you a story.”
Novels and stories charting dystopian futures have firmly established themselves as a major sub-genre of English and American fiction, running a fairly straight course from H G Wells to the author under review and taking in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Phillip K. Dick – plus myriad others – along the way. The majority, to be honest, I would not be bothered to read – let alone review. Like those streets in Istanbul where every shop sells exactly the same thing, the market is distinctly overcrowded. And yet once in a while a book comes along that extends the market rather than merely adding to it. Body and Soul, by the English writer Andrew Hook, is a rather beautiful example.
In an unspecified future, Earth has been anagrammed into Heart; an alternate world where the cities have been abandoned and the majority of the population live in small rural communities where they are self-sufficient and blissfully ignorant not only of the past but also of the world beyond their isolated settlements. Blissfully ignorant, yes – but there is a catch. To be born into, and accepted by, this new world both parents must be present at the birth of their child. The mother gives birth to the body; the father gives birth to the soul. If the father is not present, the child is born without a soul and is considered worthless – utterly worthless; unworthy of life. A shocking scene right at the beginning of the novel illustrates this. Calvin, our main character, agonisingly just misses being present at the birth of his child. The midwife, with chilling efficiency, murders the newborn she has just delivered. Welcome to the irony of a planet called Heart.
Not all these – quite literally “soulless” – children are immediately condemned. Cast adrift into the wilderness, some survive into adulthood, existing as zombies; mindless as well as soulless, feared and loathed by the occupants of any settlement they wander too close to. But they are not quite alone…
There are other wanderers too, self-imposed exiles who travel from village to village, telling stories around an evening fireside in return for some charitable food and maybe a night’s shelter before heading down the endless road to another brief encounter at another settlement. Another story; another (almost literally) captive audience; another return to perpetual solitude; another unknown destination (and potentially hostile reception) awaiting over the next horizon…
It is to be one of these that our hero, Calvin, still only a boy, but filled with a desire for knowledge beyond the narrow community that seeks to oppress him as it successfully oppresses all those around him, aspires. It is the traveller Book who fully opens the door to his inner mind, who recognises that he has “the Call,” that he has no real choice but to be a wanderer, and in so becoming must banish himself from friends and family forever:
“You want to know for yourself. You want to see for yourself. Because you are called.” Book paused. His breath could be discerned as a semi-transparent white smoke which temporarily coloured the night. “Your story is my story. I recognise you because I know you. Because I know me.”
Calvin threw him a question, knew the answer.
“Take me with you.”
Book turned, smiled. “Travellers travel alone.”
Calvin shrugged. “Always?”
“Always.”
I am not going to retell the story that Andrew Hook has so magnificently told. Even my precis of effectively the first 34 pages is, when I look back through it, inadequate to fully encompass the subtlety and tension of his prose – to say nothing of his enviable talent for character and dialogue. The subsequent 200 pages take us on Calvin’s journey; a journey that will encompass extreme dangers, unexpected romance, and a delightful interlude when Calvin discovers something entirely unknown to the people of the settlement he has abandoned – the sea! The cinematic, almost tactile, quality of Hook’s writing, sustained throughout the narrative to be sure, is particularly in evidence here. We are absolutely with Calvin, his girlfriend and their child, a four-year-old daughter, as they feel the sand beneath their feet for the first time and splash through these strange and wonderful water formations called waves…
But there is one encounter that I cannot advertise; an encounter so unexpected, so dramatically led up to, that I would do both author and reader a great disservice to reveal it here. Suffice to say that it will put everything in context and justify Calvin’s answering his “call” and abandoning his parents and his home to do so. It also, ironically, perfectly justifies the time we have vicariously spent as wanderers ourselves through the book’s pages. It is, in short, a revelation for Calvin and reader alike.
Hanif Kureishi, one of my favourite contemporary authors, who has never written a bad sentence and speaks great good sense about the art (and entertainment) of writing, has put on record: “After all, the aim of so-called creative writing is to give pleasure… This writing work is not therapy for the writer but entertainment for the reader.” The relevance of this to the book under review is that, on first reading, I didn’t just admire it as a piece of literature; I couldn’t (Oh, it sounds a ridiculous cliché, but it’s true!) stop turning the pages…
There are books, also films, that, to coin my own phrase, “transcend their genres.” Frankenstein is not a great horror novel; it’s a great novel. The Searchers is not a great western; it’s a great film. Likewise, Andrew Hook’s Body and Soul is not a fine work of science-fiction, but quite simply a fine piece of work. It deserves to be read.