Michael Desmond

Subversives obsessed by the past, which could be our future…yes, ‘very interesting…’ as a character from the 1960’s American Show Laugh In, used to say, ‘but dumb’. Robert Harris is a great wordsmith, with a good journalistic grasp of news, issues and concerns - I used to read his column in the Sunday Times. This post-apocalyptic book poses a number of thoughtful questions: what would happen if most of the population is destroyed through war, global warming, meteorite or maybe from boredom of watching too many You Tube videos? The Second Sleep does not address how the catastrophe came about, it looks at the future - depicted as our medieval past, with similar superstition, poor communication and violent hangings for criminals. As soon as plastic was mentioned, I grew suspicious: surely there were not animal-choking left overs, left over from before it was invented? Then we find out - it’s an age after the End, where the Church and others forbid a return to ancient, ie, our, ways. Fairfax as the young, idealistic priest is reasonably well drawn, although the suspicion that he’d never yearned for, or experienced, pleasures of the flesh until Lady Durston gives him such a good seeing to, his very Cross stiffens, even if his resolve doesn’t. Captain Hancock as the blunt, fearless industrialist, using a modern new fad, namely water power, to produce cloth, is perhaps unfairly cast in a poor light for having lesser social skills than Fairfax or Lady Durston - his bark is worse than his bite. As the plot thickens and antiquarian Dr Shadwell seeks the truth about the past, it does become a decent page-turner until the end when….well, when what? This book needed a moral, a lesson for all of us contemptible consumers, emitters of carbon waste and even worse, Arsenal supporters (that’s a soccer team, for any Americans reading this). At the end of Animal Farm or 1984, you feel Orwell has said something significant. Since Robert did not, I will: with all the billions of stars and trillions of planets around them in this vast universe, is it not exceedingly strange that we’ve not come across intelligent life. And the reason? Societies of one sort or another grow, develop, discover mechanisms, weapons and armaments which are fatal - and destroy themselves. Mind you, if we send Voyager a couple of million light years away, maybe it will discover a glass heated rear windscreen. I just hope we’ll be around to hear about it.

This is my favourite poem, acerbic, biblical, perhaps in some ways, prophetic. Being angry with a friend is not, ultimately, fatal and, in fact, can reflect a meaningful care for their interests and wellbeing, if dealt with sensitively. Anger towards a foe is different, less likely to end well. The foe may eat the poisoned apple, but the build-up of hatred spreads venom to all concerned.