6) ‘After London; Or, Wild England’, Richard Jefferies
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13944
I don’t know how well-known this actually is, but at the risk of
appearing ignorant I’ll assume that people are unfamiliar with it (as
I was until recently). It’s a Victorian post-apocalyptic science
fiction novel, written in 1885 and set a few centuries after some
calamity has left most of England submerged by rising sea levels. The
exact nature of the catastrophe is not explained, although it seems to
have been a natural disaster of some sort. At the first signs of
trouble the wealthy and educated cl***** all buggered off never to
return, leaving behind only those who had no idea how anything works.
As a result, all the marvels of Victorian technology have been lost,
and England has reverted to a kind of medieval agrarian feudalism.
This England is a pretty brutal place, where serfs end up nailed to
trees for looking at someone the wrong way, and travel outside the few
pockets of order and stability is made dangerous by ‘Bushmen’ and the
occasional marauding band of Celtic pirates. The hero is a young
nobleman who, unlike his peers, has too much ambition and intellectual
curiosity to be content with a life of hunting, feasting and grinding
the faces of the poor. In frustration he builds a boat as a means of
escape and goes off in search of a place where his talents can be put
to better use. The rest of the book is about his adventures.
I loved it, but I’m not completely sure exactly why. Jefferies was
also a natural history writer, and the first chapters set the scene by
describing at length how plants and animals gradually reclaimed the
cities after the people had gone. There’s something wonderfully
Pre-Raphaelite about his descriptions of the tangled forests and the
people and animals who inhabit them, and more than a hint of Arts and
Crafts romanticism in the pastoral society he describes. Obviously
it’s interesting just as an early science fiction novel; there is one
bit where the hero is sailing through the pestilent swamp which is all
that remains of London which invites obvious comparisons with ‘The
Drowned World’. But the plot and storytelling are a bit weak, and
despite the setting I don’t think Jefferies is actually all that
interested in the collapse of civilisation as such. There’s quite a
lot of social commentary on issues like poverty, class prejudice, and
the stifling of talent and expression, but the main theme is the
hero’s existential quest to find some sort of place in the world. I
suspect there is a lot of Jefferies in the character of the hero, and
I think in the end it’s this personal dimension which makes the whole
thing a lot more interesting than it would otherwise be.
7) ‘Division Chief Kosaku ****ma (Part 1)’, Ken**** Hirokane
A rather charming manga about a middle-aged salaryman which is
apparently very popular among middle-aged salarymen. Kosaku ****ma is
an advertising executive who succeeds in business where others have
failed by being bold, direct and handsome. As fiction it’s not up to
much, but as a glimpse into the world of cor****ate bu****do it’s quite
fascinating.
8) ‘The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion’, Mircea Eliade
This is about the human capacity to perceive certain otherwise
ordinary things and places as somehow supernaturally charged, or
sacred, and how this tendency manifests itself in modern secular
societies, even if only at a subconscious level. Or at least I think
it is – I can’t be entirely certain because most of it went over my
head. But there were enough interesting bits to make it worth the
effort. In fact it would have been worth reading just for the
wonderfully allegorical story of the holy pole of the Achilpa:
http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/0195115880/gill.numbakulla/
http://www.zen62450.zen.co.uk/fbc/fbc2008.html
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