Inside the machinery of thought control

Express Tribune

12-05-2025

After the invigorating success of a crippling pandemic, fate now offers our generation its next best creation: the spectre of war. And in a time where war is not just waged on borders but on the black mirrors that run our lives, reading political fiction becomes less pastime, more an act of resistance.
Books that expose media power, herd mentality, and the quiet suffocation of dissent feel urgently alive amid India's current war-mongering, where image eclipses reality and emotion trumps truth. These four novels remind us that control often begins not with remotely manoeuvred war machinery, but with what we are told to forget, who we are taught to fear, and the truths we're told to stop questioning.
'The Memory Police'
Set on an unnamed island where objects, and eventually memories, disappear by authoritarian decree, The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa captures the chilling ease with which societies accept erasure. Ogawa's prose is spare, haunting. People forget perfume, then birds, then novels. The horror lies not in what vanishes but in how unbothered the public becomes. The novel is a meditation on complicity, media silence, and the serenity of mass forgetfulness. If you've felt the numbness of watching public memory be scrubbed clean, this book will rattle you awake.
'The Power'
What happens when power changes hands, but not its structure? The Power by Naomi Alderman imagines a world where women develop the ability to emit deadly shocks. The balance shifts overnight, but the systems of dominance remain. Alderman dissects how power corrupts, regardless of who holds it. Through news clippings, oral histories, and a fictional framing device, she mimics the fractured lens of media: unreliable, constructed, always spinning. It's a sharp, cinematic punch that asks: if we could remake the world, would we rebuild the same machinery?
'Darkness at Noon'
The most powerful thing in the world is an idea. This is both good and bad news. Written in 1940 but devastatingly contemporary, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon explores the psychological violence of ideology. Through the interrogation of Rubashov, a once-loyal revolutionary turned dissenter, we see how totalitarian regimes rewrite logic until betrayal looks like duty. In India's current socio-political climate, where dissent is branded as sedition, Darkness at Noon feels less like historical fiction, more like a mirror.
'Amatka'
In this surreal Swedish gem by Karin Tidbeck, language holds literal power: stop naming an object, and it dissolves. Bureaucracy is religion, and words are weaponised. Tidbeck's precise, uncanny prose indicts state propaganda and reminds us of the quiet danger in letting others narrate our reality. Truth, sometimes, is just a few mindful words away.
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