Elizabethan apocalypse
Historical fiction specialist makes the present the distant past in new thriller.
At first glance, Robert Harris’ atmospheric new thriller, The Second Sleep, opens 550 years ago, as a lone horse rider –young priest Christopher Fairfax – picks his way through the wild moorlands of Wessex.
Fairfax has been sent by the church to conduct the funeral of a village cleric, Lacey, killed in an accident at a remote structure called the Devil’s Chair, shunned by the locals because of its malevolent reputation.
During his first night in the shabby little settlement, Fairfax learns its villagers are active, out and about, in-between their nightly “first and second sleeps”, whereas most people elsewhere stay safely indoors. The existential significance of the “sleeps” gradually widens to multiple interpretations.
This wretched place holds many mysteries. When Fairfax searches Lacey’s study for documents to inform the eulogy, he finds books and papers written by so-called antiquarian scholars ruled as heretics by his church.
Just as damning is a cabinet full of artefacts from the “Elizabethan era”, including fragments of glass and plastic and a slim black object with a symbol on its back, “an apple with a bite taken from it”. A symbol, he has always been taught, of blasphemy.
Fairfax’s detective work – he’s not so much a sleuth as deeply puzzled – upends the reader’s perception of time, shaped by where we are right now. The narrative, initially thought to be in the past, turns out to be almost 1000 years into our future.
Harris unfolds a past and a future separated by a cataclysm known as “the Apocalypse”, which occurred in the mid2020s. After a period of lawlessness, a new social order – ruled by the church – has reset the calendar and banned all earlier advances in technology and communication. Primitivism and superstition rule; women are subjugated; life expectancy is low.
What caused the collapse of a civilisation its contemporaries – us – might regard as advanced and invulnerable? A six-point scientific prediction of possibilities, found by Fairfax in Lacey’s room, is immediately, horribly plausible. Those points are the subject of a paper written by one of the “ancients”, a scholar who was once a recipient of an arcane oddity called the Nobel Prize.
Although Fairfax spends less than a week in the village, each day brings startling new surprises, which make the impetus of the narrative so irresistible. It seems his life as a priest (imposed because he was an orphan) is being replaced by his expanding role as an explorer and truth seeker.
Harris, who writes a wide genre of novels, from interpretations of ancient Roman history ( Pompeii, Imperium) to a thinly disguised takedown of Tony Blair in The Ghost, has never seemed more assured or portentous.
It’s rare to experience a novel you don’t want to end. But with chapter subheadings such as “Fairfax goes for a walk”, the priest and a team of men enlisted from the village head towards the Devil’s Chair – under a dark, pewter sky – and an intense finale filled with dreadful foreboding.
The artefacts include a slim black object with “an apple with a bite taken from it”. A symbol, he has always been taught, of blasphemy.