"The Second Sleep" by Robert Harris

A well-written, pleasurable yarn.

The plot is almost impossible to describe without a spoiler alert. The first words are "Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468" which makes one assume that it is a historical novel set in the mediaeval period. Towards the end of chapter three I learned, with a wholly unexpected shock, that this was the 'second sleep', the second mediaeval period following the apocalypse (later dated to about 2025 when all the computer driven infrastructure failed and society across the world collapsed, with mass starvation). This is therefore a post-apocalyptic novel and, predictably, the church is on top having forbidden 'scientism' and antiquarianism as heresies. Christopher Fairfax, a young priest, rides to Adcot to conduct the funeral of the parish priest. But while there he discovers that the late incumbent had a taste for antiquarianism and was, perhaps, on the verge of a (forbidden) archaeological discovery when he was, perhaps, murdered. Throw in a seductive widow in a decaying stately home and a thrusting, ruthless mill-owner always alert to the possibility of profit and wooing said widow, and two antiquarians and we have the makings for a slightly strange dystopian fiction.

It is definitely better than the much lauded Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel which has the ridiculous premise that, following a global pandemic, not only do most of the cast of an acting troupe coincidentally survive (must be the luvvie genes) but also they benefit the world by touring the countryside offering plays and concerts which is so much better than the benighted heathens nearby who believe that the most useful cultural knowledge to preserve is a knowledge of physics so that they can reassemble electric motors and engineered civilisation again. But if you like dystopia I would recommend:

• The Book of Dave by Will Self, a similar concept in which the world has reverted to mediaevalism following global warming
• Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley, a sex-obsessed fantasy following a nuclear holocaust
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, a 'last human' novel 

Memorable moments:

• "The corpse was long and thin, packed in sawdust and bound up tight in a papery white linen shroud, like a chrysalis ready to hatch." (Ch 2)
• "How grief ages us, he thought, with sudden pity; how vulnerable we are, poor mortal creatures, beneath our vain show of composure." (Ch 2)
• "Not for him the fanaticism of some of his fellow younger clergy, with their straggling hair and beards and their wild eyes, who could sniff out blasphemy as keenly as a water hound unearths truffles." (Ch 3)
• "ragged, skinny, weather-coarsened country folk, drably dressed, with an ugly scattering of disfigurements that told of hard births, heavy work and poor diets." (Ch 4)
• "Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation." (Ch 6)
• "All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is." (Ch 6)
• "He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible." (Ch 6)
• "History was a patchwork of voids." (Ch 8)
• "The forge was set back from the road at a crossroads. A horse in the forecourt stood tied to a wooden pole that was perhaps twelve feet high, from the top of which, suspended by chains, hung a large yellow plastic scallop shell of great antiquity, battered and much-repaired." (Ch 9)
• "‘So Church and state should be separate?’ ‘It would be best for both.’ ‘Then surely we would arrive at a place where the Church would have morals without power, and the state would have power without morality." (Ch 11)
• "It’s your Church I don’t believe in, sir. Your God I treat with respect." (Ch 18)
• "Faith that cannot withstand the truth is not a faith worth holding." (Ch 19)
• "Fairfax took his hand. It was hard and calloused, a cudgel of flesh." (Ch 19)
• "Quycke spread his hands – an overly emphatic gesture, Fairfax thought, such as might be made by an actor on the stage to convey sincerity." (Ch 22)

A quick easy read, which kept me turning the pages without being hooked.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also by Robert Harris and reviewed in this blog:

• Conclave