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Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest

I have white skin. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. I am tall. I usually dress conservatively: sports jackets, corduroy trousers, knitted ties. I wear spectacles for reading, though they are more an affectation than a necessity. I smoke cigarettes occasionally. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church; I do not have any objections to other people doing so. When I married my wife, I was in love with her. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I have no political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

My skin is smudged with dirt. My hair is dry, salt-encrusted and itchy. I have blue eyes. I am tall. I am wearing now what I was wearing six months ago, and I smell awful. I have lost my spectacles, and learned to live without them. I do not smoke at all most of the time, though when cigarettes are available I smoke them continually. I am able to get drunk about once a month. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church. When I last saw my wife, I was cursing her, though I have learned to regret it. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I do not think I have political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

Among the first books I reviewed when I started this blog was Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions. After writing the review, I looked online to see what others had thought of it and discovered that I’d liked it more than most. The reason seemed to be because the London Kunzru was writing about was the London of my childhood; I recognised his book as true.

The problem with that of course is that if a novel needs a reader who was there (though I was only a small child in the 1970s) then it will struggle both for longevity and a wider readership. My Revolutions did find a wider audience than just me, but not as appreciative a one as he found for some of his other books.

I grew up in Notting Hill, more specifically North Kensington (near the north end of Ladbroke Grove for anyone reading this who knows London). It wasn’t then as fashionable as it is now; in fact North Kensington (despite what the word Kensington suggests) was one of London’s more deprived areas. It was also an area with large Black British and Afro-Caribbean communities and there were often tensions between them and the older white communities (Sam Selvon’s excellent The Lonely Londoners and his Moses Ascending both explore the area’s immigrant experience, my reviews of both are here).

Sometimes there were riots, and as a child one particular street (All Saints Road, the band All Saints named themselves after it though god knows why) was known as “the front line” because it was seen as a border between black and white neighbourhoods and a no-go zone for police and whites. The no-go bit was a myth incidentally, I walked through it on several occasions without the slightest problem (other than an assumption I was looking to buy drugs).

All of which brings me to Christopher Priest’s 1972 novel Fugue for a Darkening Island. Priest is a writer of what is sometimes called slipstream fiction, a term he invented as far as I know. He provided the foreword for Anna Kavan’s Ice and is a writer who straddles the line between literary and science fiction without recognising the boundaries of either. He can be challenging, and while Fugue is far from his best novel in some ways it’s perhaps the most challenging of all of them.

Racists sometimes talk of immigrants “swamping” Britain; of them “overrunning” the country. Fugue is a novel in which their worst fears are realised, That’s what challenges here: it’s not the fact that the narrative is a mosaic which cuts forward and back among the protagonist’s experiences and memories so that only by the end is the entire story clear; it’s the fact that Priest has written a book which explores racism in a profoundly visceral way.

War has broken out in Africa. Some of the powers involved have got hold of nuclear weapons. They use them, rendering large parts of Africa uninhabitable. The result is a human tidal wave of refugees; millions of them. Many come to the UK; more than the UK can absorb. The result is social breakdown, civil war, the descent of the UK into the sort of hellhole the Africans are fleeing from.

The obvious parallel is with War of the Worlds, in which Britain finds itself on the receiving end of the colonialism that it dishes out elsewhere, thanks to the Martians. Here there are no Martians, but the essence is the same. Priest asks the same question as did Wells, how do we like it when the atrocities happen in the Home Counties, rather than Rwanda or the Congo?

Fugue is written from the perspective of Alan Whitman, but not chronologically. Some sections are from his life before the UK’s collapse, with Alan indulging in meaningless affairs while ignoring both the increasing sham of his marriage and a dangerous drift to the hard right in UK politics. Some are from the period in which society began to break down, with Alan looking for somewhere he and his family can safely wait out the approaching storm. Some are from after that storm has hit, with Alan one refugee among many looking now for his wife and daughter who have been kidnapped by an Afrim militia group.

The Afrim are what the African refugees are called in the novel. It’s never explained why, which lends it a certain verisimilitude as the characters after all would know why. As the novel takes Alan’s perspective though the Afrim are largely faceless; a mass of indistinguishable black aggressors who literally steal his women. It’s a troubling portrayal and it plays directly into racist stereotypes (“Once the Afrims have a street to themselves, they spread through the rest of the district in a few nights”, and later “‘Then you should know that the Afrim command has set up several brothels of white women for its troops.’”). I don’t think this is a racist novel, but it’s definitely capable of a (incorrect) racist interpretation.

Priest describes in the detailed and fascinating foreword how he was in part inspired by the cosy catastrophes of writers such as John Wyndham and John Christopher. He wrote against a backdrop of political violence in Northern Ireland, barricaded streets and paramilitaries driving families from their homes.

We realized we would probably be forced to abandon our house in Southgate the day the barricade was erected at the end of our road. Although terrified by the prospect we did nothing, because for several days we thought we might be able to adjust to the new mode of life.

In Northern Ireland sectarianism led to social cleansing, not that we use that term when it happens in the developed West. Catholics and Protestants often found themselves living in different areas, and entering one group’s territory if you belonged to the other could be dangerous even if you weren’t yourself political. For Catholics and Protestants read Hutus and Tutsis, Serbians and Bosnians, a myriad sectarian squabbles.

The following day we were at home when we heard the noise of the Martins being evicted. They lived almost opposite us. We had not had much to do with them and since the Afrim landings had seen even less of them. Vincent Martin was a highly qualified research technician and worked at an aircraft components factory in Hatfield. His wife stayed at home, looking after their three children. They were West Indians.

Soon Alan is on the road with his wife and daughter, heading to his wife’s parents in Bristol and avoiding “the barricaded Afrim enclaves at Notting Hill and North Kensington”. We know they don’t make it, and Alan becomes a refugee pushing his few belongings across England in a wheelbarrow. The violence spirals out, not just white against black but nationalists against those who sympathise with the plight of the African refugees. Alan finds himself in a warzone, policed by UN troops who do little to help. When he meets combatants it doesn’t really matter much which side they’re on because none of them give a damn about the civilians caught in the middle. At best the various militaries hand out propaganda, then move you along.

He offered me an immediate commission into the Secessionist forces, but I turned it down, explaining that I had to consider Sally. Before we left he handed me a sheet of paper which explained in simple language the long-term aims of the Secessionist cause. These were a restoration of law and order; an immediate amnesty for all Nationalist participants; a return to the parliamentary monarchy that had existed before the civil war; the restitution of the judiciary; an emergency housing programme for displaced civilians; and full British citizenship for all contemporary African immigrants. It reflected exactly what I hoped would happen, but all our recent experiences had underlined the impossibility of a peaceful solution to the present chaotic fighting.

Alan incidentally spends a fair chunk of the novel criticising his wife’s passivity and refusal to recognise what’s going on and so help herself. As the novel progresses though it becomes evident that Alan’s not really that different, that what he hates in her is in part the mirror of his own failings. Fugue is as much an exploration of Alan’s psychology and how he reacts under extreme pressure as it is a bringing home of conflicts we’re used to seeing on the TV, and it’s that dimension which ultimately makes this a better book than many of those which inspired it – Alan is simply more real, more flawed and human, than most protagonists are in this sort of book.

Fugue isn’t without its problems. In the foreword Priest talks about how he thinks that when he wrote it he was too influenced by the coolly distant style of the 1970s new wave movement and by writers such as Brautigan and Vonnegut. Part of the reason he rewrote the book was to change stylistic and language choices which worked in the 1970s but which with the passing of time carried overt political interpretations which hadn’t been intended, but part too was that with hindsight he felt that his influences had resulted in a book the language of which didn’t really suit the subject matter. I’ve not read the original, pre-revision, version, but even here there is at times a conflict between the intentionally flat prose and the horror it describes.

I’ll definitely be reading more Priest, and I’m glad I read this because while it is exceptionally bleak in both tone and outlook, it does humanise the nameless refugees who from time to time populate our news. There used to be a saying in English, there but for the grace of God go I. It’s gone out of fashion, but it expresses an important truth. Given different circumstances, a run of bad luck, political developments beyond our control, those people we perhaps send a little money or a food or old clothes donation to could be us.

In my last review, of Berlin Alexanderplatz, I talked at the end about how that novel continued to have a contemporary resonance. Fugue, despite the unlikely subject matter, does too in its way. I’ll leave you with two final quotes:

The country was in deep recession. We had a government that prided itself on fiscal expertise, but they made one bad decision after another. John Tregarth and his government had first come to power because of their economic policies but the balance of payments was in the red for month after month, public borrowing was at an all-time high, prices continued to rise steeply and an increasing number of people were made unemployed.

and

Meanwhile, democracy was taking its turn, and a General Election was held in Britain. It was a time of economic recession, with many people jobless. Inflation was high, loans were difficult to obtain, many companies were going out of business. A new right-wing party, initially a splinter group from the Conservatives, campaigned successfully on the basis of economic reform and isolationism as a cure for our employment problems.

The cover above is the one I have. I couldn’t resist sharing this one though, which utterly misrepresents the novel on pretty much every front:

Anyone who bought the book on the basis of that cover would have been sadly disappointed.

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is probably now Cormac McCarthy’s best known novel. It won the 2007 Pulitzer prize for literature, it’s had almost uniformly good reviews, it’s been made into a film starring Viggo Mortensen – it’s one of those occasional novels that cross over from the literary world into popular(ish) culture.

In some ways, that’s a surprising thing. It’s only a little over 300 pages long, but it has no chapters, no easy narrative, it has a setting of unusual bleakness and a dense and sometimes highly inaccessible prose style.

On the other hand, it is in the main beautifully written (though at times the writing I think goes a little overboard, something I’ll return to) and it has an emotional core to it that will resonate with a great many readers. It’s a spare novel, stripped back (save sometimes for the prose) and at its heart it’s focused on the relationship between an unnamed man and his equally unnamed son, the two of them struggling through a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape that contains almost nothing living except themselves.

It’s unlikely anyone reading this doesn’t know essentially what The Road is about but, just in case, I’ll quickly set it out. The novel takes place some years after what appears to have been (it’s never clearly specified) an all-out nuclear war. The world is shrouded in nuclear winter, the sun barely visible through permanent heavy clouds of ash and dust, the cities are burnt and filled with corpses and the country is denuded – the trees dead and clogged with ash and the animals gone with them.

Among the few survivors are a man and his son, the boy born shortly after the apocalypse and so never having known the world before. The mother is dead, all that is left is this pair, and all they have is each other. They push their meagre possessions ahead of them in a shopping cart, heading for the coast where they hope to find life and something more than the desert that the world has become, but the impression is that they are moving because they have to, and because there’s not enough food left to make it feasible to stay put in any one place.

As they progress, they avoid other survivors, many of those who are left have resorted to cannibalism and food is so scarce that anyone met on the road is more likely to kill them than help them. The man lives to protect his son, to keep the flame alive as they both often say, and in this country of the dead there is plenty to protect the boy from. The world is full of dangers, full of those who would harm his child, with the mother gone he is all that stands between his small son and the horrors of an existence utterly indifferent to his child, sometimes outright hostile.

The power of the novel, of course, is that parents today feel this protective love, this sense that they are all that stands between their child and an indifferent world full of danger. Parents always have felt that, likely because it’s often true. The Road succeeds not because of the particular facts of its characters’ situation, but because those facts set out in relief a common human emotion. The knowledge of the fragility of something you love more than your own life, the desire to keep it safe, the knowledge that you will not be able to forever.

The Road didn’t start well for me, or rather it started well but quickly alienated me. By about half way through, that alienation ceased and by the end I enjoyed the novel and was glad I’d read it, but for a while it was touch and go. The problem was the language and, to an extent, the premise (which is unfortunate, because the premise doesn’t matter).

Early on the man and his son pass through a derelict city filled with mummified corpses, “discalced to a man”. The sentence goes on to explain what discalced means, it’s not a common word after all (shoeless, generally used in a religious context in relation to orders that walk unshod), but it threw me out of the novel. Firstly, I wondered what discalced meant, the sentence explains it but it’s not often I encounter new words so I took a few moments to look it up anyway. Secondly, the sentence goes on to explain that all their shoes were long stolen, and I found myself thinking, by whom exactly? There are hardly any survivors, the dead vastly outnumber the living. I can accept that the men’s shoes would all be gone, years have passed and shoes can’t be repaired after all, but the women’s? In the grim post-nuclear future are there really people stealing pairs of high heels? The women with sensible footwear would have bare feet, sure, but that still leaves an awful lot whose shoes would I think be left in place.

It’s a petty point, and I was annoyed at myself for being jarred by it, but I was jarred by it. And as the novel continued, more discrepancies struck me. Put simply, the setting doesn’t entirely work. The thing is, that doesn’t really matter, because the novel’s not about its setting, it’s not an attempt to create a credible and worked-up post-apocalyptic environment. It’s a setting that is there to cast the relationship of the central characters into relief. If I hadn’t grown up with science fiction, I doubt I’d have noticed or cared, however I did and throughout I found myself troubled by things which seemed contrived more for effect than plausibility.

That issue was I suspect a fault in me. The other issue I found though was more problematic, on occasion The Road is simply overwritten. Here, the man remembers a conversation he had with his wife, after the bombs fell but before her death, he is trying to persuade her not to kill herself:

I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
Oh yes he is.
Please dont do this.
I’m sorry.
I cant do it alone.
Then dont. I cant help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all. You say you cant? Then dont do it. That’s all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time.

Put bluntly, nobody talks like that. A woman considering suicide, considering abandoning her husband and newborn baby because she is filled with utter despair, does not talk about her “own whorish heart”. That’s blatantly a novelist writing for the effect of the prose, utterly unconvincing. The whole passage reminded me that I was reading a novel, a conceit, again it threw me bodily out of the sitatuation and the characters.

Also, reading the above section, you may notice the use of apostrophes. In brief, where a contraction ends with a t, McCarthy doesn’t use an apostrophe. Hence dont, cant, wont. Where a contraction ends with another letter, he does use one. Hence you’re, I’m, it’s. I’m not quite sure what the logic of that is. I can understand using apostrophes properly, I can understand omitting them entirely. McCarthy though creates a new grammar, where they are used correctly save where the word ends in a t in which case they are omitted. That’s regular enough a rule that I thought about it, and it became a distraction.

So, what did work for me? If the dialogue, grammar and sometimes even the writing jarred, why am I glad I read it? Well, because that’s far from the whole story.

Firstly, although McCarthy does sometimes lapse into portentousness, mostly he avoids it and he can capture scenes with a subtlety and power that is quite breathtaking. This scene, earlier than the one quoted before, captures I thought with understated grace the horror of the end of the world (which, as one character argues at one point, from your own perspective is no different at all to your own end, the boy is perhaps the man’s refutation of that argument).

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I’m not.

Why are you taking a bath? I’m not. Marvellous. McCarthy packs a lot in here, we see that the man understands what the flash of light means and that now water will be hard to come by. In a moment, he has seen what is happening, what it will bring, and what must be done to have any hope of survival. It’s a wonderfully understated and subtle moment, terrible in its many implications.

Equally, the new and morbid landscape through which the man and boy travel is often wonderfully evocative. They sleep in a forest of petrified trees, which suddenly start to collapse around them. Snow falls on paths already clogged with ash. The sky is dreary and occluded, and all the birds are dead.

And, above all, there is the relationship between the man and his son. This is beautifully captured, it is the book. They tell each other that they are the good guys, that they are keeping the flame alive. The man teaches his son to fear the bad guys, cannibals and casual killers, and seeks to instil in him some form of morality. But the boy is more moral than the father, when they encounter (as they sometimes do) others worse off than themselves, the father fears them as potential competitors for resources, the boy feels compassion and wants to help them. The boy is innocent, the father isn’t, but the boy’s innocence exists in part because the father sacrifices his own in order to preserve it.

The two reassure each other, the boy is terrified whenever his father has to leave him, to search a building for supplies or to scout the road ahead. He seeks comfort that they are still the good guys. He asks questions with no answer. And, since I shared some not so good dialogue earlier, here’s a passage which I thought captured brilliantly the way children sometimes think and talk:

Do you think there might be crows somewhere?
I dont know.
But what do you think?
I think it’s unlikely.
Could they fly to Mars or someplace?
No. They couldnt.
Because it’s too far.
Yes.
Even if they wanted to.
Even if they wanted to.
What if they tried and they just got half way or something and then they were too tired. Would they fall back down?
Well. They really couldnt get half way because they’d be in space and there’s not any air in space so they wouldnt be able to fly and besides it would be too cold and they’d freeze to death.
Oh.

I don’t want to speak to the ending, but it has an emotional and metaphorical logic that gives it tremendous power. The point of The Road is the journey the man and boy undergo, a journey that all parents undergo. The man protects his boy, pretends that things will be ok, warns him against strangers. The boy in turn understands more than the father would like, for all the father tries he cannot wholly preserve that innocence.

The man’s greatest problem, worse than starvation and predatory strangers, is that without him the boy is often too trusting and too unaware of the dangers around him. The boy though, unburdened by the father’s crippling fear for his survival, sometimes sees some things more clearly, understands that life is more than one’s own survival.

In large part, this is a novel about hope. The father’s hope is all in his son, an object of perfect love, everything he lives for. The boy’s hope is a broader thing, he hopes not just for them, but for others they see who may need help themselves. The flame is alive because the father holds it for the boy, keeping it alight until the boy can keep it going on his own.

There’s a lot to be said about this novel, certainly more than I have here (and this is already a long writeup). I’ll leave then with one final quote, an example of imagery both terrible and beautiful, a combination that McCarthy is no stranger to.

The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake.

Trevor, of The Mookse and the Gripes, wrote up The Road here in a review which picks out its key elements with great accuracy. In particular, it’s easy when reading about how the novel is about the love between a father and son to fear that it may be mawkish, sentimental. Trevor brings out why that is not so, and quite how true the capturing of that relationship is. Trevor also didn’t get bogged down by setting as I did, and brings out nicely the references to the way the world is becoming something primal again, pre-civilised. His take is well worth a read.

Edit: I forgot to link to Kerry’s review of The Road, here, which is excellent on the religious symbolism of the novel and the importance of keeping going as part of being human. There’s already some discussion of the end over at Kerry’s, so I’ll likely post my own thoughts on the final paragraphs over there.

The Road

For years now, we’ve treated the land as though it were a piggy-bank, to be raided.

The Death of Grass, by John Christopher

I’ve long been something of a fan of John Wyndham, criticised on occasion for his “cosy catastrophes” in which civilisation falls but people remain generally polite about it. It’s not a criticism I agree with, for a start only two of his novels actually deal in apocalypses (The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes – The Chrysalids takes place centuries after one once order has been restored, and in any event is far from cosy with its religious bigotry, torture and murder). Still, it’s not a charge anyone would lay against John Christopher’s 1956 novel The Death of Grass.

The Death of Grass was a novel that first caught my attention years ago, when I was a teenager. I never saw a copy though, so when John Self reviewed the new Penguin Modern Classics edition over at The Asylum I mentally added it to my to be purchased list. This last week, fancying a break as far from possible from Powell’s wonderful A Dance to the Music of Time, I finally ordered it. As a break between more serious books, it works pretty well, it’s easy to read, powerful and in places is quite horrifying in its portrayal of what people are capable of when pressed. It’s also though not that well written, and the characterisation is dire. It’s worth reading, but it’s not high literature.

Grass generally takes place a couple of years in the then future, so in the late 1950s, but it opens with a prelude in the 1930s where we are introduced to two brothers, John and David, and the farm that David goes on to inherit – a property in a valley closed on three sides and easily sealed off on the fourth. Like Chekhov’s gun, that valley becomes quite important.

As the novel proper opens, famine is sweeping China. A plague that affects rice has caused terrible famine, vast numbers of Chinese are trying to get into Hong Kong in the hope of finding food, but Hong Kong cannot hold against them:

‘You think Hong Kong will fall?’
‘I’m sure it will. The pressure will build up until it has to. They may machine-gun them from the air first, and dive-bomb them, and drop napalm on them, but for every one they kill there will be a hundred trekking in from the interior to replace them.
…
David said: ‘But if they took Hong Kong – there can’t be enough food there to give them three square meals, and then they’re back where they started.’
‘Three square meals? Not even one, I shouldn’t think. But what difference does that make? Those people are starving. When you’re in that condition, it’s the next mouthful you’re prepared to commit murder for.’

And that, in a nutshell, is the novel. When you’re in that condition, it’s the next mouthful you’re prepared to commit murder for.

At the outset, John Custance is a pleasant and civilised middle class man, happily married with two children. He and his wife play bridge with their friends, Roger and Olivia, Roger occasionally appalling them with his hard cynicism. Still, they’re good people, respectable, the sort you might find in a Wyndham apocalypse. They’re troubled by events in China, all that death, but it’s a long way away.

From the radio, a voice said, in B.B.C. accents:
‘The United Nations Emergency Committee on China, in its interim report published to-day, has stated that the lowest possible figure for deaths in the China famine must be set at two hundred million people…’
Roger said: ‘Dummy looks a bit weak in hearts. I think we might try them out.’

Christopher is making a point here. When we hear of disasters elsewhere, our sympathies often extend to those affected, but generally not for long. There are children to be put to bed, jobs to go to in the morning, washing up to do. With all that, it can be hard to remember the deaths of strangers.

At first, the problem seems restricted to Asia, the disease has spread to Europe, but Europe is not dependent on rice. World governments are confident that a counter to the virus can be found, but the Chinese were confident of that too, and before too long China no longer exists as a nation.

All too soon, the virus has mutated, killing all grass plants, including wheat and barley and the crops upon which our lives depend. Governments lie, reassuring their populaces and claiming that a counter is just around the corner, as food supplies in warehouses grow low and countries stop sending aid increasingly concerned that they may need it themselves. Today in Britain, after BSE, this part of the story doesn’t seem as science fictional as it might, with its self-serving politicians more concerned with the electoral implications of panicking the population than of taking sensible steps to protect them.

Hearing rumours that the government intends to drop atomic bombs on the major cities so as to reduce the population to a sustainable level, John, Roger and their families decide to flee London, heading for that oh so defensible valley. On their way out, they pick up Pirrie, a seemingly mild-mannered gun shop owner who contributes weapons and brings his much younger wife. The roads out of London are blocked off by the military, travel is restricted, and fearing nuclear annihilation they calmly ambush and execute three soldiers manning a roadblock so they can make their escape.

Faced with the threat of starvation, knowing that the country’s food reserves have run out and that they have a day or two at most before everyone else realises it too, the group swiftly become ruthless – killing when they must, leaving others to die rather than risk resources helping them. Pirrie turns out to be a sociopath, utterly remorseless and deadly, he is appreciated all the more for it. As Custance reflect:

They had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be traced back nearly four thousand years. In a day, it had been swept from under them.
…
There were some who would choose to die well rather than to live. He was sure of that, and the assurance comforted him.

It comforts him, because they’ll die, and so not compete for food.

Britain’s descent into savagery is swift. There is casual murder, rape, robbery becomes commonplace. In less than 48 hours from the realisation that the food has run out, it’s every man for himself, roving mobs taking what they want and the air force bombing cities to stop the hordes spilling out into the wider country.

At times, the book is genuinely chilling. Custance’s wife and daughter are raped, the rapists are captured and Custance’s wife calmly explains to one as he begs for his life that she decided she would kill him while she was lying there watching him rape her daughter. In another scene, Custance and Pirrie murder a couple for food, then give the surviving daughter to Pirrie as a form of sex slave. Custance all too quickly adapts to his new role, the seemingly ruthless Roger deep down remains a decent man, Custance for all his morality becomes a new feudal chief – able to decide whether others live or die:

After enthronement, the tones of the supplicant beggar were doubly sweet. It was a funny thing.

Christopher’s view of human nature is not a pleasant one. In Grass, those who maintain standards, who try to preserve some decency, die. Those who remain are the new savages, the future is one of barbarism. A world of strong and ruthless men, and those who serve them or die.

The weak points of the novel are easily summarised. The prose is nothing to write home about, workmanlike but it’s the vision it contains that the novel’s worth reading for. Characters are fairly one-dimensional, particularly the women who are bizarrely helpless not even taking turns driving or carrying a gun. It’s still not clear to me why the women need be so helpless, I can see that an apocalypse would make men’s greater strength again more of an advantage, but when Samuel Colt made all men equal he made all women equal too. Here, the women are objects, chattels as one herself angrily comments (though the novel itself seems to agree). They are protected, or raped if protection fails, but beyond cooking they seem to be incapable of doing anything for themselves. The sexual politics of the book are distinctly dated.

But the central vision isn’t. Environmental collapse is a theme more timely than ever, and as Robert Macfarlane reminds us in an excellent (and commendably spoiler-free) introduction, in the real world diseases like Ug99 have already caused crop failure and famine. As he notes, bad as the crop failures in Grass are for the people of the 1950s, they would be much worse for the “just-in-time” delivery world we inhabit today.

Grass is a powerful novel, immediate, not perhaps fine literature but it’s continued fame is deserved. As well as John’s writeup, Tom at A Common Reader wrote it up here. I agree with every word of his and John’s reviews, both of which draw out points I’ve not chosen to focus on in my own comments.

The Death of Grass