Sleepwalking to oblivion
THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris (Hutchinson £20, 336 pp)
AT FIRST glance, Robert Harris’s new novel looks like an honest-to-goodness medieval mystery.
West Country cleric Fairfax senses something fishy when he is sent to bury Lacy, a fellow priest found dead in a small parish eight hours on horseback from Exeter Cathedral.
Remember, though, that Harris made his name with the parallel-reality postwar thriller Fatherland, so don’t be fooled.
When Fairfax discovers that Lacy was hiding a secret collection of ancient artefacts — including an iPhone — it’s the clearest of several early signs that The Second Sleep might actually be more X-Files than Cadfael.
It soon turns out to be set not in the last millennium, but near the end of this one, long after an apocalypse kept teasingly out of sight — not least to the novel’s characters, living in the shadow of a church taking deadly measures to ban any kind of historical inquiry.
As Fairfax pieces together what took place, he gets caught up in a love triangle with a local woman whose manor lies atop a mass grave containing clues as to how society collapsed.
This steadily engrossing tale stakes its clout on a last- gasp reveal that proves shockingly effective, though there’s a limit to how compelling even a writer of Harris’s gifts can make the archaeological dig on which the thunderbolt climax depends.
Harris creates a sinister, sometimes ugly, frisson from glimpses of life in his imagined England — not least in the passing detail about a permanent war with an Islamic caliphate in Yorkshire.
However, the book’s real power lies in its betweenthe-lines warning that our embrace of the internet represents some kind of sleepwalk into oblivion.
It’s a provocative, tubthumping sci-fi of which H. G. Wells might have been proud.
THE CONFESSION by Jessie Burton (Picador £16.99, 464 pp)
CRITICS weren’t always convinced by the historical backdrops to Burton’s two previous novels, The Miniaturist and The Muse, set during the Dutch Golden Age and the Spanish Civil War respectively.
Her new book stays closer to home, and feels much the better for it, using an everyday story of a Londoner’s early midlife crisis as the springboard for an absorbing mystery of betrayal and samesex desire.
It follows Rose, a waitress in her 30s, stung by being abandoned as a baby by her vanished mother, Elise.
When Rose learns that Elise once had an affair with a novelist, Constance, some quick thinking allows her to trick her way into the now-elderly writer’s home in the guise of a personal assistant, secretly in search of answers.
Burton’s title takes on a double significance in this clever and finely crafted tale of a woman trying to find herself.