This post also appears on WaferThinBooks.com.
There have been plenty of novels about some cataclysmic disaster overwhelming England, but aside from J. G. Ballard’s first three novels about the disaster taking the form of wind (The Wind from Nowhere), water (The Drowned World), and drought (The Burning World), most are well over the wafer-thin limit. So, if you’re in the mood for taking your dystopia in pocket-sized form (and not getting enough from the daily news), here are five mostly-neglected ways you can ruin an evening or two.
After the Rain by John Bowen (Ballantine Books, 1959, 158 pages)
An attempt to break a drought in Texas becomes a global disaster. Slowly. The narrator, an advertising copywriter, like many London commuters, learns to don wellies and slosh his way into the office, where the management exhorts its staff to “Get flood-conscious copywise.” But soon the rising waters flood the Underground, streets turn into rivers, and our chap and his mate get their hands on a dinghy and row their way out of London. Within weeks, England becomes unrecognizable and largely uninhabited:
So we went on through that flooded countryside. The water covered the fields, and the flat bottom of the dinghy sometimes scraped the tops of hedges. We had left the Thames valley, and we were lost more frequently as we worked our way westwards along the troughs of water that lay between the hills, until every now and again hills would come together, so that we had either to back or slosh through the mud and rain, dragging the dinghy to the next stretch of water.
During those days we saw neither animals nor people. Those animals which had not been drowned would long ago, we supposed, have been eaten, and the people the villages would either be dead or have been evacuated to areas more easily supplied with food. Only once,
the grey of evening grew deeper before nightfall, we came across a little hillock surrounded by water, from which a single gaunt beast—a child’s pony, by its size—stared at us. We drew nearer, and it lifted its head, and neighed. As we paddled on into the twilight, the sound pursued us for long after the pony itself had vanished from our sight.
Eventually, they encounter other survivors and together they assemble a raft that becomes their new home, their new land—with all the old problems of people attempting to get along in a too-small space. A solid story with some amusing satirical moments. Bowen, who was also a screenwriter and playwright, turned After the Rain into a play several years later.
One by One by Penelope Gilliatt (Atheneum, 1965, 187 pages)
A mysterious plague overtakes England. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the first months of the COVID pandemic, half-measures and confusion lead the crisis to spin out of hand and an ineffective government quickly puts its own survival over that of its citizens: “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Overwhelmed, people resort to denial: “Not many of us believed in our own death.”
People have many instinctive motives for protecting themselves from a knowledge of catastrophe. Some of them are evasive; others have to do with a man’s conception of his duty, or his very genuine and deep-bitten feeling that if ill-fortune is already having a whack at his world he had better not incite it to worse by noticing it. The distemper struck England as if sent by some blast of the stars, and for a long time most of us tried to ignore it. We disbelieved it, blamed it on official carelessness, diverted our buried panic into vicious reprisals upon the West Indians or the Jews and felt sure that there must be a pill for it, though probably not on the NationalHealth.
A shortage of medical staff results in the narrator’s husband, a veterinarian, being enlisted, first as a nurse and soon as a doctor. Returning to London by train one evening, she sees an orange glow in the distance and realizes it’s the light from a bonfire of burning corpses.
A common problem that faces any writer who chooses to create a great catastrophe is how to end it. Do you let it run amok and wipe everyone or almost everyone out? Does it somehow resolve itself? Do you simply exit, leaving the characters to sort themselves out? As anyone who’s read Stephen King’s massive apocalyptic novel The Stand knows, the collapse is the fun part; putting things back together is anticlimactic and had spelled the death of many a promising narrative arc. And, sadly, One by One is another victim: a terrific start; a disappointing finish. However, it may still rate as England’s best COVID novel until someone writes a better one.
I wrote about One by One here back in 2020: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=6609
Leftovers by Polly Toynbee (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966, 189 pages)
The French film director René Clair made a silent called Paris Qui Dort (English title, The Crazy Ray) in which a group of people aboard an airplane manage to be the only people to avoid being frozen in sleep by a mad scientist’s rays and then spend days cavorting around Paris, picnicking on the Eiffel Tower and stealing valuables, until a few decide to try to bring the city back to life. Polly Toynbee’s novel Leftovers had a similar premise: when London falls victim to a powdery gas that kills everyone who inhales or touches it, a handful of young people manage who happen to be in an odd corner of the Underground survive. When they emerge, like the passengers in Paris Qui Dort, they proceed to have themselves a jolly good time, ransacking Buckingham Palace and having sex in the most luxurious settings. When all that frolicking leads to pregnancies, however, they find themselves reverting to the values of the establishment they’ve just spent months flaunting. Toynbee published this at the age of 19, before she’d even attended university, and rather like Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, it is better appreciated as work of fun than as a work of fiction.
The Time of the Crack (republished as The Crack) by Emma Tennant (Jonathan Cape, 1973, 142 pages)
One lovely summer evening, London is shocked by an enormous noise and a great trembling of the ground as a crack appears in the middle of the Thames and the northern suburbs rise up above the city behind a gigantic cliff. In the subsequent hours and days, people panic, flee, take refuge in luxury hotels, or generally run amok. Society quickly breaks down. A group of mentally-ill children escape their therapist guardians and take over an abandoned hospital:
The five-year-olds, led by Neddy and Mary, a brother and sister who were regressing together (and who before their rescue by Thirsk had been respectively at Wormword Scrubs and Holloway) were playing doctors in the emergency wards. Neddy, brandishing his scalpel, was striding impatiently from bed to bed as Mary prepared the patients for their operations. He had decided to amputate the leg of a man with a serious heart condition, who was attached to various complicated-looking machines….
The crack continues to grow wider and wider and the bands of survivors in the ruins between the highlands of the North and the river fragment into various cliques: hundreds of women follow a wild-haired seer called Medea Smith; a few wealthy developers assemble an army of enforcers that gathers and herds others into concentration camps as laborers for their grand project to construct a bridge across the crack. And everyone watches the people and cars that pass back and forth in the distance on the Other Side and fantasizes about what awaits there. One man, a die-hard leftist, builds a balloon to transport his family there:
Jeremy Waters worked hard, his fingers trembling with impatience. It was clear to him now that if he and his family reached the other side, they would at last find the life which he had hoped to find in Hampstead. At last, a society in which ecology and socialism went hand in hand. A society of brothers, fighting together to preserve the strange and beautiful structures thrown up by the Crack, and treating each other with decency and respect. Communism without a dictatorship! And the worst of it was that Waters might be too late. Everyone else had got there first.
But Nature tolerates neither vacuums nor the Crack, and a greater disaster looms just a few pages further. Having witnessed her first novel, The Colour of Rain, published pseudonymously, be trashed by the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia as the embodiment of the decline of English fiction, she set aside her pen for nine years until she was inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard and decided to try again. Ironically, though the two writers were leading a revolution in science fiction, they offered her mundanely pragmatic advice: structure the book in four parts of 40 pages each; sequence events up to a climax; introduce and develop a core set of characters. She later described The Time of the Crack as “very carefull plotted,” and it certainly avoids the problem of the post-catastrophic letdown.
They by Kay Dick (Penguin, 1977, 94 pages)
They appeared as a Penguin original in 1977. With a simple black-and-white cover, a literally wafer-thin spine (under half a centimeter) barely able to hold text, and printed in perhaps 1,000 copies or less, it quickly disappeared, despite winning the South-East Arts Literature Prize. I found my copy in a bookstore in Antwerp only when it showed itself squashed to the back behind several thicker volumes by Joan Didion. I suspect most of the originals that survive have likewise slipped to the back of bookshop shelves and been forgotten.
Luckily for Kay Dick’s legatees, two keen “archives moles,” Lucy Scholes, who was still writing her Re-Covered column for the Paris Review, and Becky Brown, Curtis Brown’s head of heritage copyrights, both stumbled across it in early 2020 and a five-way bidding contest for the publication rights ensued, with Faber and Faber (UK), McNally (US), and Knopf (Canada) emerging as winners. The rediscovery was splashed across just about every major English-language journal with a book section and many thousands more copies that Penguin ever printed have been sold. So They is certainly not neglected anymore.
Kay Dick was a woman notorious for cultivating quarrels like a winemaker perfecting a vintage and even with the rediscovery of They, Dick is finding both champions and critics among its readers. It is a deeply ambiguous novel (indeed its ambiguity is reminiscent of Olga Ravn’s recent novel, The Employees (at 125 pages, also wafer-thin). Related in nine episodes by its narrator, it tells of the encroachment upon and isolation of the artists and poets of England by increasing numbers of sinister figures apparently associated with the state and intent upon, well, dumbing down the country. Their methods grow more ruthless and brutal. They gut the National Gallery. They take a woman who continues to paint from her home and blind her. They hound the dwindling survivors into ever-more-threatened pockets. It’s not surprising that many see in They an allegory for the gutting of some of England’s most vital public services, from the NHS to the water system, or for the ham-fisted censorship and assault on reproductive rights and queer lives in states like Texas and Florida. But it can also be read as a dismissal of the masses as brutes too ignorant to deserve their right for a voice in a democracy. Either way, if you like to be unsettled by a book, you won’t go wrong with They.