The City of Gold and Lead
by John Christopher

Literature for young adults is divided between those who try to impart useful knowledge about life ahead and those who, having found life's byways ran more into stagnation than thoroughfares, want to project their neurotic sense of fear onto children. This book, despite being of the former sense, plays with the latter by addressing adult paranoia in a metaphorical form, much like cult movie They Live: what if our society was taken over by aliens who attacked our minds and not our technology?

In the contemporary or future setting of the book, the narrator and protagonist Will is a thirteen-year-old boy in a pre-technological land ruled by giant mechanical tripods. These outer space critters allow humans to conduct their affairs so long as every adult is "capped," or implanted with a mechanical brain control device, at age 14. As part two of a trilogy, The City of Gold and Lead describes the infiltration of an alien city on earth by Will and two cohorts. In the previous book, Will and his cousin Henry had observed how capping reduced creativity and made people automatons, and so had rebelled, destroying a tripod and heading to the French alps where they were free from oversight.

Now part of a revolutionary group, Will returns with a false cap to disguise himself amongst the oblivious and compete in Olympic-style games whose victors go to serve the "Masters," or organic creatures that pilot the tripods, in their city of a gold barrier and high internal gravity, completing the image of the title. His mission is to infiltrate and learn as much as he can about the aliens, and then if possible, escape. We don't do spoilers in this review, so you'll have to RTFB to learn more.

As someone who ponders how to tell his own children about growing up in this world of uncertain leadership and future, I'm grateful for this book, which presents in gentle metaphor the necessity of tackling the adult condition outside of its ostensible function. Adults do get capped around age 14, when they start worrying about careers and how others see them; both are linked by the function of pluralist systems, where the most votes or buys make successes, since there is no real goal to life other than serving ourselves because we share few values in common.

Numerous metaphorical details throughout the book are convincing. First, the capped are docile, but aggressive toward each other in their pursuit of wealth. Second, technology is a liberator in the right hands, and slavery in the wrong. Third, the honest and holistic viewpoint of childhood, which values creativity and loving life more than material, is praised for what it teaches and also shown to lack wisdom, which is gained by characters through struggle. Finally, the book shows us several interesting characters who have become aware that things are not as they seem, and rebelled by living apart from the capped herd.

While most books for children and young adults try to sugarcoat reality, in this book a sense of menace and fear pervades every page. That emotion roughly corresponds to what most children 11-14 are feeling about the world they're about to enter. Unlike books that try to show us happy thoughts, and have us take them at face value, this book shows us a world lost in its own minds, and how to overcome that situation and prepare for eventually defeating it.

By not presenting another illusion to help us through a bigger illusion, it introduces helpful knowledge; by telling us of victories and defeats, it shows us how we can escape what will drag others down. In doing so, it escapes the trap of psychology, which takes symbols and society at the same face value, and gives young adults in the grip of justifiable social paranoia and outlet and a nurturing, exciting, sustaining game plan. I'll be stuffing stockings with this subversive and fun masterpiece of young adult literature this Christmas.

The White Mountains Trilogy:
The White Mountains (1967)
The City of Gold and Lead (1967)
The Pool of Fire (1968)