Published by Dundurn Press/Rare Machines on September 12, 2023

“What is considered innocent today may not be so tomorrow.” That Kafkaesque explanation for B.’s plight sets the tone in South, a novel in which authoritarian rulers censor books, erase their critics, and change the rules without notice.

The time and place in which the novel is set is never identified. That choice underscores the risk that authoritarianism can arise at any time in any nation.

After a drought, men moved south to work on oil rigs. Those jobs won’t last because oil production is exceeding demand. Steel factories and refineries are closing. Strikes are shutting down industrial cities; union leaders have mysteriously disappeared. Independent fishermen can’t compete against the big industrial ships. Wells are going dry; fresh water is scarce. Diseases have spread for which medicine had no cure. The legendary people of the wind perform rituals to drive diseases from the body. Whether the rituals work is a matter of opinion or faith.

B.’s father brought unions together. B. is writing a book about his father to help him understand his father’s disappearance. His mother believes his father left to protect the family. B. knows he won’t be allowed to write about his father’s union activism, but the publisher has sanitized the first chapters to make his father unrecognizable. The last book B. completed was about storks, but he had to avoid mentioning the environmental destruction that is wiping them out.

Now B. is driving south because his Editor asked him to write a report about an oil rig. He is to write what he sees or learns from the workers. The assignment puzzles B. but he wants to please the Editor. The Company has given him permission to visit but isn’t cooperating with his investigation.

B. is stymied by the resistance of workers to his interview requests. He gets information from an assistant cook who disappears. He watches a man set himself on fire. Otherwise, he has little to write about and he's afraid to send his editor the few facts that are worth reporting. He hides his notebook but it soon disappears.

Eventually B. is imprisoned on a ship and isolated. He is forced to write whenever he’s awake. He doesn’t know what to write, but his interrogator implies that writing is the key to his freedom. It is more likely the reason for his imprisonment. The interrogation is designed to reshape B.’s thoughts, to sever him from his identity. Only after the interrogator believes his will is broken does B. see other prisoners on the ship, including a woman he encountered on the rig. Even his silent efforts to commune with her are thwarted, or so it seems to B.

When B. narrates his backstory, we learn that he drinks too much, makes poor choices, and has low self-esteem. He lives with Tara but had an indiscreet moment with a woman he met in a bookstore. He receives a package on the rig that suggests the encounter was a setup. Then he receives unsettling news about Tara. He doesn’t know if anything he learns is real. His experiences are eventually indistinguishable from hallucinations. His dreams merge with visions that merge with reality.

Kafka’s vision of ordinary innocents trapped in the bewildering absurdity of authoritarian rule never loses its relevance. It probably won’t be a spoiler to suggest that authoritarian rule will leave B. a broken man. Breaking people is the point of authoritarianism. Is there a possibility of recovery from such damage? The novel provides no clear answer but leaves room for hope.

Late in the story, characters debate the best response to authoritarianism. The media is state-controlled and the news can’t be trusted. Protests lead to tear gas and beatings and confinement. The state relies on terror to control its citizens, but it can’t lock up everyone. When it locks up writers and other people with known faces, it sparks more protest.

In the long run, perhaps resistance is not futile. “Working within the system” can be perceived as cowardice or selling out. It can also be seen as self-protection or a strategy of incremental change. These debates are relevant to people who live under authoritarian rule. They’re also important to people who recognize the danger of electing authoritarians in a democracy.

South is published by a Canadian publisher, but Babak Lakghomi’s home country is Iran. He understands how government propaganda is used to control and confuse. Trump’s press secretary presented “alternative facts” when confronted with real facts, a small example of how misinformation is wielded as a tool of government even in a relatively free democracy.

Lakghomi tells his story in a minimalist style from the perspective of an unremarkable protagonist. Those choices assure that nothing distracts from his powerful reminder of how authoritarianism can creep into any environment and change the life of any person who makes even a small effort to question authority.

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Life is often confusing. We often realise that however much we want to take control that the universe seems to throw everything else in our way. Is that just random chaos or could we attempt to divine deeper agendas? In South by Babak Lakghomi a writer finds himself offered an opportunity, but it is a dangerous and unpredictable world that awaits him. Sadly, I found the book did not meet the task of projecting that feeling and instead just seemed to poorly replicate well-worn predictable paths.

B is a journalist trying to write a book about his absent father but recently hired to work as a freelance investigator. He goes to the South of the unnamed country and to cover the dangerous oil fields where people scrape by in ever more dangerous conditions. He is not trusted and he feels cut off from the world. He finds he may be getting investigated and someone knows about a one night stand he had that he is hiding from his wife. Are there corrupt governments or malign supernatural powers at work?

When you use lead characters with a single initial it is not hard to think of Kafka’s work and Lakghomi is definitely aiming for a strange claustrophobic world where every decision leads to more problems and no way out. But the book feels to be simply tries to be replicating these types of tales and many others seen in literary fiction without adding anything fresh itself or even getting the approach to provide a coherent narrative.

Nearly all characters and locations are known by their titles rather than any names. So, we have characters such as The Editor or The Assistant Cook. I always struggle with this as it feels a little unimaginative type of storytelling and the characters here are fairly thin at the best of times. The story jumps constantly from B’s unhappy childhood, his affair, his love for his wife and his struggles with an editor who no longer likes the book he was said was great. It is a scattershot approach that I think is aiming for a demonstration of chaos but ultimately feels like it is lacking any plot. The book goes for a terse style but never really sits down to explain things. For 200 pages this tale felt much longer and got nowhere fast. Safe to say this is sadly not a book I can recommend.

South is an ambiguous novel about the creeping insidiousness of a certain kind of totalitarianism. The question is, does its ambiguity, its lack of concrete setting or really any reference to extant politics or organised religion damage or strengthen its effect. And is Lakghomi really talking about the dehumanising effect of such regimes in general, or much more interested in the specific dehumanising and destruction of his lead character?

I'd argue the latter, which doesn't rule out the former, but the lack of anything concrete about the regime slowly working on our lead does mean that it is only effective in the abstract. B is a journalist, though recently mainly a memoirist having written a book partially about his father. He is sent South on assignment, to an industrial rig (the word suggests oil but this is a book that suggests a lot of things). Personal items are removed from him, information denied him, all communications end up going through a secretary, everything is read, some is with-held. As he tries to get his story he meets some subversives who then get disappeared, and the red tape gets thicker, and thicker until he realises that despite his middle-class credentials, he is as trapped as the rest.

South is a short novel, and it gets to the point pretty quickly, it ratchets up the confusion, fear and eventually helpless sadness efficiently. We see the effect of isolation, and imprisonment of various kinds on his own mind, the paranoia that kicks in about his own marriage, later played out. The ambiguity that suffuses the book does give an everyman sense to the novel, while at the same time, B's own reminiscences (particularly that of an attractive woman he followed home once) undermine his everyman quality. And yet by the end of it the book succeeds in its aim, of showing how anyone can get broken down and even lose everything without openly appearing to do so.

I loved the cruel landscape that the protagonist had to encounter. This is a very vivid portrayal of a journey through what our world could look like.

Thank you SO MUCH for this ARC :)

I wanted to love this one, the synopsis gave me hope but in the end this one fell flat. I felt like I was listening in through the wall on one side of a telephone conversation. I finished the book not even understanding what I had just read because I felt like I had missing pages. It’s going to be a no for me.

South is a really thought provoking twisted story. Babak Lakghomi takes the reader on an ever more confusing journey through the perils that an oppressive form of capitalism can exhibit on the mind. I definitely appreciated the context of the story. Framing the story around the struggle for workers rights in our ever deteriorating economic and environmental system sets the story up well to have a last impression. I think it comes up just shy of being truly special though. We definitely established a good foundation, and the story gets progressively more interesting. For me the story wasn’t too hard to follow, but it doesn’t help that the book is short and so everything moves very fast. It leaves the story ripe for multiple readings and discussion. I’m just not sure if the tone or plot ever became extraordinary enough in it’s concept.

Dystopian fiction is my jam. I love the heightened sense of drama and thinking about what I would do in any given situation (die quickly, probably - LOL). South gives us a glimpse of a totalitarian society where we're not quite sure what the government is suppressing after drought has punished the land. B, our main character is a journalist and his recent works have garnered some interest, but we're not quite sure whether that is a good or bad thing. He is offered a job investigating an oil rig and he takes it, not realizing how isolated he will be during the project. Cut off from his girlfriend, editor, publisher and real life, he quickly realizes he must be careful in what questions he asks and what he reports about.

The sheer tension and panic that builds with this one is overwhelming. It reminded me a bit of watching the first episode of 60 Days In, where a non-criminal is trying to figure out what are the right and wrong things to do. B starts off very naive, and we learn has potentially run afoul of the powers that be with his previous work on his father's life. He is finding these things out as we are and repeatedly he puts his trust in the wrong people and gets himself further and further into disaster. I enjoyed the stress and nervousness that built. The story is a bit short, so it didn't quite make five stars for me, an extra bit of detail giving us more of the culture of the time and seeing B fighting back a little would have rounded this one out for me. Even without that this is a quick, powerful dystopian story that is well worth your time.

Thanks to Dundurn Press for gifted access via Netgalley. All opinions above are my own.

A dystopian novel that is a tad dry. Storyline is well developed and characters are compelling. This would be a good book to read when in a darker mood.

Dystopian with a dose of disorientation.
There’s misinformation throughout and an unreliable perspective that the reader experiences. This book is indeed an experience and does have a flavour of 1984. Though short the story does not seem so as it packs a punch. Societal and mental health breakdowns are well presented in a bizarre turn of events and imagery. A great book for a book club as I think it would give rise to many a discussion.
Thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for an E-ARC. This is a voluntary review of my own thoughts.

A claustrophobic, dystopian novel about entrapment, control, and loss of self, South is a great novel to pick up if you really like 1984.

The novel is one of those that, while you’re reading it, you know there is a deeper meaning. You think you know what the novel is trying to say, but, just like B, the main character, you are so distracted by what is happening in real time that the bigger picture is overtaken by individual concerns until the book is done. But I think this is the point. It’s mimetic in that sense that we’re just as lost and confused and frustrated and then horrified as B is, by what happens to him.

It’s clearly a dystopia, but we’re not sure where the novel takes place. The “south” is just the south of a country. We’re not sure what country it is, which is what makes the story so compelling. Rather than a direct commentary on a specific place, the novel shows how what happened to B could happen to anyone in such a state.

Now, is B particularly likeable as a person? No, he’s not. He’s a cheater. He’s kind of lazy. He wallows and doesn’t do anything to help himself. Yet, I wonder how much of that is deliberate. Had he been someone we loved and cared for, the story would have been about one man’s struggle, not about the injustices carried out by a totalitarian state. Rather than make B a martyr, the novel makes him a casualty. The horror of the book isn’t that this is happening to him but that it could happen, as I said, to anyone.

Now, I will say, the novel does get a bit dry and bleak at times, and though it is short, it does feel somewhat long. While I thought it was well-written and interesting, at times, I was confused as to who certain people were or what was going on. While I bet some of this was intentional, it doesn’t make for an enjoyable read in the sense of following the plot.

But, if you like commentary about corporate deception, the surveillance state and totalitarianism, you will probably enjoy this, but if you want something more straightforward and heroic, I’m not sure it’s for you. But, I also don’t think it’s a book meant to be “enjoyed” but to make you think. At that, it excelled. It's just bleak!

South is a mysterious, enthralling mystery that follows B, who has been tasked to travel to an offshore oil rig to investigate labour strikes that have been occurring. His journey to this place has proven to be hellish, and as time goes on, B's writing and stream on consciousness becomes even more muddled and hallucinatory. Memory and reality is often intertwined and the lines are constantly blurred between the two. The tone of this book is eerie and you are drawn in because of the uncertainty of what is happening. This dystopian novel was clever and intriguing, but many of the themes felt like they draw farther from being dystopian, and perhaps becomes closer to our reality.

Thank you to Dundurn Press, Netgalley, and the author for a gifted e-arc of this novel!

In Babak Lakghomi’s novel, South, everything is unreliable. “B” is a writer sent on assignment to the south, where the decimated economy has shifted to marine oil rigs, though even era may be rapidly waning. He has few guidelines from his shadowy Editor. He’s also trying to write a book about his missing father, but the Publisher has his own agenda. He can see his wife becoming more distant by the day. He is already dislocated at the beginning of the book, and it’s only going to get worse.

We readers are in the same place as B. South is a bit of an experience, where things start out unclear and only become weirder as we go. What is true and what is deception? How reliable is information? Are the people around him friends or foe? Or spies for the state?

This near future dystopian exploration of totalitarianism had an unsettling tone, written with a poetic sensibility. The imagery is haunting, and I was especially taken with the idea of the Wind: It represents loss, disorientation, trauma…almost like a future-syndrome. I wish the idea had been fleshed out more, but perhaps that was purposeful: B lost his copy of a book about the Wind, and no copies apparently exist in this rapidly shifting autocratic society. Gone. Information controlled successfully.

The writing style is striking: short sentences, disjointed, few formed paragraphs. It took some getting used to, but in this book I think it worked. It gave me a sense of B’s dislocation and disorientation. Sometimes the prose seemed like poetry, so structured and precise were the sentences on the page.

Lakghomi has given interviews about the book, and notes that the rise of misinformation, climate anxiety, propaganda and totalitarianism both in America as Trump was elected, and in his birth country of Iran, inspired this novel. This is a short book, and could be read in a day for a taste of something a bit different, and was a great one to discuss with my reading group.

A starkly written exploration of the demise of civilisation through the perspective of a man whose sense of self and worth are crumbling. It's a grimly told story of societal and psychic breakdown - really compelling and disturbing - like a car crash that one cannot be drawn away from watching.
The narrator is a journalist reporting on the southern off-shore oil fields in a dry, dusty and isolated world. The sea is mostly barren. Pearl farmers and fishermen now have to work on the off-shore rigs for financial survival. Latent violence haunts the pages of this short but sharp novella. With an essence of dystopia driving the tension, I really enjoyed this story as being like nothing really that I've read before in this genre. It has all the ingredients - first person voice of the loner outsider; a nameless, faceless Company; spiritual and social decay and the hints of a better and more fulfilling past.
Strongly recommended.

**I received an arc**

Super quick read, finished in a few hours. I felt like I was losing my mind along with B and it kept me going through page after page. The narrative feels surreal, but, of course, this is also steeped in reality. Is Bs world that far fetched?

3.5
Thanks to the author/publisher for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a dystopian book about a freelance journalist who travels to the southern part of an unnamed desert country, where he's tasked to write about what's been going on on an offshore oil rig. But he soon finds out that it seems like nobody actually wants him to be there...

This was a really interesting reading experience. The actual things that happened in the story are often interesting, but all of it is delivered in this really dry prose that might just make some readers check out completely. But what was happening was intriguing me enough to keep me going.

It felt like a mysterious puzzle with a conclusion that is maybe not as good as the process of solving it. The main character, B, is really unlike most protagonists out there. His thought processes are really weird sometimes but the book still managed to get me to care about him. A part of that is because of his relationships to the people around him, which was done really well.

There are times where B's mental state caused the book to blur the line between reality and dreams, and I found those moments to be really good, before the book inevitably returned the story to a more grounded state.

Because of this, there were a lot of things that were touched on but never really expanded much, which bothered me a bit. I feel like the book should've either been shorter to make it even more mysterious, or longer so it can flesh out more of the subplots.

Ultimately, it's still really interesting even though I didn't love it, and anyone who likes dystopian novels should probably pick this up.

Not knowing what is real, what is happening, what is about to happen or if everything is true. South is a novel where you may not know what is happening, and you may not want to, especially as a politically charged dystopian story.

This is a book where memory is meshed with reality, and where paranoia is the driving force of B, the narrator. We understand B to be some kind of writer or journalist who wrote a draft book about his father in order to investigate who his father really was. He is estranged, to a point, from his partner, Tara. He is sent south to an oil rig to ask questions about recent employee strikes and look for answers, with no way to communicate with the outside world. Time seems to stand still. Power and the truth are at odds against each other and There are many tragic/traumatic events going on in the oil rig.

You become just as disoriented as B, with the state of the world, in a time frame that is never confirmed to any of us. We know there are mobile phones and internet. The oil rig is isolated, just as every person on the oil rig is, and B became more and more detached as time progresses. He become further inhibited when he challenged those in power about what they knew an becomes a prisoner on a cargo ship. The superstitions of the wind spirits plague B’s mind. The contrasts of the cold wet oil rig drowned out the dryness and red earth of the South seem to be at scale to the tension and fear alive in B’s mind. How much will B’s guilt consume him?

We only ever hear off two names in this book: B and his wife, Tara. Everyone else is named by their occupation: the Secretary behind the desk, The Assistant Cook. We never hear of a geographical name, just a place like the oil rig. The disconnection is alarming and stark.

Eerie yet intelligent, if that makes sense lol. This is the type of book that grabs you right from the start, and you won’t let up until you’re done

I gave this 35% but then had to DNF. I felt the writing was really dry, and the subject matter one I didn't love. I'm sorry, thank you for the copy anyway.

What. A. Story.

I picked this one up weirdly based on the cover. It reminded me of a band logo I designed in high school. But I digress.

This book won’t be for everyone. It’s confusion, claustrophobic and at times a bit dry. But overall it’s an enthralling yarn that is worth your time.

In SOUTH by Babak Lakghomi, we follow B., a freelance journalist, as he travels to report on an oil rig in the south. I felt that this book was really confusing and that may have been the author's intention. I just don't think this book was meant for me. There were times on the oil rig which felt super claustrophobic which I thought was really cool that the author was able to portray that feeling. Overall I enjoyed the book and I am glad that I read it I just don't think it was for me.