(MENAFN- The Conversation) Between 2013 and 2015, Malorie Blackman was Britain's first black children's laureate. Her young adult series Noughts and Crosses (2001-21) at once challenges and plays with the prevailing racial ordering of western life and thought.

Blackman's series is set in an alternative Britain called Albion, where power is held by a dominant, black majority known as the“Crosses”, while the white“Noughts” are stigmatised minority subjects. In doing so, Blackman suggests that if we see difference as threatening or inferior, then any alternative worlds we imagine will just reflect our own culture. The upending of racial formations, the books seem to suggest, could result in an equally powerful, reverse form of oppression .

Most contemporary criticism and the book's most well-known adaptations (at the Royal Shakespeare Company and for the BBC ) treat Blackman's series as a case study of anti-racist political allegory, counterfactual historical, or dystopian fiction. Their focus tends to be on the forbidden romance between Callum McGregor, an increasingly disaffected and conflicted working-class Nought, and a Cross politician's wealthy and privileged daughter, Persephone“Sephy” Hadley.

But it is also possible to read Noughts and Crosses specifically as an attempt to show systems of oppression at work: how they prop up (neo-)imperialist power, enable racial segregation and traumatise people.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

Noughts and Crosses isn't just a dystopian story – it's a critical dystopia, meaning it aims to inspire political thought and change. Critical dystopias don't usually show us a better world; instead, they make us think about how one might be created.

What makes a critical dystopia powerful is how it mixes everyday life with moments of fear or tension. This mix makes familiar situations feel unsettling, encouraging readers to see the world differently. It pushes them to question unfair or harmful systems and imagine better alternatives.

The power of secrets

In Noughts and Crosses, Callum and Sephy repeatedly come up against suppressed truths and hidden histories. The truth behind Callum's sister Lynette's fragile mental state, for example, is revealed to be a vicious racist attack on her and her Cross boyfriend prior to the events of the novel. But by the time Callum learns this secret, it is too late to stop the events leading to Lynette's suicide, which draws Callum's family deeper into a terrorist militia.

Author Malorie Blackman in 2007. Commons , CC BY

The novel's constant use of hidden knowledge draws attention to the atomised condition of life in a racially divided state. Particularly significant here is a picture of the family unit in which dreams, aspirations and motivations are only partially knowable – and never completely fulfilled. Tragedies such as those experienced by the McGregor family galvanise the tribalist rhetoric of a segregated society.

On the other hand, the novel shows that through discovery, its young characters become more sceptical about any stories that they have been handed by that social order. When Sephy learns that she has an older half-brother, she concludes:“Nothing in [her] life was a fact. There was nothing to cling on to.”

This is also the case when Callum struggles to“find something of sense to hold on to” after his brother Jude's admission that he became more radicalised due to learning another crucial family secret – that their great-grandfather was a Cross.

Noughts and Crosses does explore, at times, what happens when marginalised voices are repositioned as central. But it also seeks to heal society's divisions while challenging its self-defeating logic and suggests that one way to do so is by revealing the truth.

In the novel's final passages, the reader learns that Sephy has defied her parents' wishes and given birth to her and Callum's baby. This can be read as a suggestion that their – and perhaps our – social divisions can be healed, eventually, and that a less divided future is possible.

The trailer for the BBC adaptation of Noughts and Crosses (2020).

At the same time, however, Blackman sometimes seems to make the truths told in the novel – like what Callum reveals to Sephy as the“biggest secret of them all” – clearer to us, the readers, than her own characters. This is not just a matter of plot, but one of effect. As readers, we start to become immersed in a rush of twists and unravellings, crossings and unwindings, until we can almost glimpse a different kind of reality, beyond the segregated world of the novel.

In the end, the novel is not recentring one part of society at the expense of another – it is recentring us, the reader, and how we think about its world and ours, by inducting us into the secrets of others. In this context, the act of writing – and reading – is an act of hope.

This is the art of the critical dystopia: the further we read, the more we become engrossed in the shadow texts, or truths of which the characters themselves might be unaware, about how society could be fractured, transformed and remade.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we're asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn't (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Blanka Grzegorczyk's suggestion:

David Fickling Books

Haunted by real-world histories, and specifically by the repeat patterns of the colonial past and neocolonial present, S.F. Said's alternative Britain in his critical dystopia Tyger (2022) is one where the British empire still rules the world, and slavery was never abolished.

The novel brings its exposé of the terrors of the imperial past to bear on the present moment.

In its exploration of art- and story-based forms of oppositional agency, the novel highlights British Muslim characters Adam and Zadie's calls for a future where a truly sustainable and equal way of living might be possible. At the same time, it shows them acting as if that hoped-for, radically transformed world already exists in the present.

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