Long distance

Penelope Mortimer's Long Distance follows a nameless woman in a place she has barely begun to understand. An early attempt to chart it fails, and the region seems cut off from both her former life and the familiar world. The novel begins with an unsettling calm that slowly turns into bewilderment, as the narrator's hold on where she is and how she got there weakens.

Time has no grip here, since there are no clocks, and her own recollections feel fainter than shared ones. Her companions are few and mostly disquieting: Gauleiter Gondzik, a forceful, self-assured man whose name is spelled several different ways; Mrs. April, a housekeeper who acts as her jailer; a dog and a crying baby she feels drawn to; and Simon, a gentle presence who keeps her company after she is moved to the institutional West Wing, where shock treatment and drugs are meant to make her conform.

Over time the setting shifts from a strange limbo into a portrait of an automated, authoritarian society that is itself unwell. The book is concerned with womanhood, identity and the forced erasure of individuality, and its atmosphere recalls the psychiatric ideas of R. D. Laing.