Facial Justice
First edition, 1960
Facial Justice (1960) by L. P. Hartley is set in England after a Third World War has driven the surviving population underground, emerging into a society reconstructed around the elimination of envy. The state identifies physical beauty as the primary cause of social resentment and requires its citizens to submit to surgical alteration at the Equalization (Faces) Center, where faces are standardized into one of a handful of approved stock models. Those rated Alpha, meaning too attractive, are "put down" to Beta. Those rated Gamma may apply to be raised. The goal is a population of faces that provoke neither desire nor disgust, and the Dictator, referred to throughout as "Darling Dictator," administers this leveling with the full machinery of ritual, bureaucracy, and social pressure.
The novel follows Jael 97, a Failed Alpha who resists the operation despite pressure from her brother and the ambient conformity of those around her. Hartley constructs his satire around the logic of enforced equality taken to its bodily extreme, a society that has solved the problem of envy not by cultivating tolerance but by abolishing the differences that provoke it.
Hartley is best known for The Go-Between and was not primarily a speculative fiction writer, which makes Facial Justice an unusual entry in his bibliography and an underappreciated one in the genre. Anthony Burgess included it in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #10477.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
The novel follows Jael 97, a Failed Alpha who resists the operation despite pressure from her brother and the ambient conformity of those around her. Hartley constructs his satire around the logic of enforced equality taken to its bodily extreme, a society that has solved the problem of envy not by cultivating tolerance but by abolishing the differences that provoke it.
Hartley is best known for The Go-Between and was not primarily a speculative fiction writer, which makes Facial Justice an unusual entry in his bibliography and an underappreciated one in the genre. Anthony Burgess included it in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #10477.
Fine in fine dust jacket.