Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. Gutter code C6.
Cover art: Vera Bock
Blurb: “Like George Orwell's classic, 1984, FACIAL JUSTICe is a novel about the New State-both terrifying and believ-able. It is a revelation of a life to come, founded on self-basement and equal-ity; all citizens are delinquents: none can be branded worse than another.
Sackcloth is the uniform; there is no speed, no violence, no height, no com-petition, no incentive to betterment.
After World War III the earth is reduced to ruin and the remaining population has lived underground for a number of years. An unknown
"voice" has led the people out into the sunshine again, but this Dictator has molded a world which is relaxed, non-violent, and rigidly egalitarian. Envy is recognized as the single cause of personal unhappiness and social friction, so that a girl who feels facially underprivileged can apply to the Ministry of Facial Justice to be fitted with a standard Beta face-not too pretty, but far from plain. It is a state of seemingly perfect freedom.
So, at least, it seemed to Jael 97 until she went on the excursion to the west tower of Ely Cathedral, one of the few
tall buildings left after the leveling destruction of World War III. There she had her moment of ecstasy, of self-asser-tion, and began the process that led her to be the first revolutionary of the New State.
The lightness and clarity of L. P.
Hartley's writing create a whole new world in a few quick sketches. He is little concerned with scientific prog-ress, but his readers may well be struck by the prophetic way in which the fundamental moral ideas of the most powerful doctrines today - Christianity, Communism, sociology, psychoanalysis
-seem to have fused and become actual in his vision of the future. His characters are no mere robots, however; they are all too human beings, and Jael her-self, with her surges of passion and anger and unfashionable intelligence, her fatally feminine self-awareness, is a real heroine. Her totally irrational fight against the best of all possible Dictators is, like herself, at once challenging and appealing.“