Book World: A look at the post-apocalyptic world envisioned in the novel ‘After London’

After London By Richard Jefferies Dover Editions. Paperback, $14.95 --Listen! “The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.”

That’s the opening of Richard Jefferies’s 1885 novel, “After London.” In it, we learn that “the passage of an enormous dark body through space” has tilted the Earth’s axis, altered the seas and the climate, and driven England’s population into a frenzied panic. While “the richer and upper classes made use of their money to escape,” none of the ships in which they took passage was ever heard of again. Meanwhile, great conflagrations consumed the towns. Domestic animals, crazed by hunger, grew feral. Any small surviving pockets of humanity quickly reverted to ferocious barbarism.

Once the Thames began to silt up, London itself was doomed. As Jefferies’s unnamed narrator explains, “It is believed that . . . the waters of the river, unable to find a channel, began to overflow up into the deserted streets, and especially to fill the underground passages and drains . . . . These, by the force of the water, were burst up and the houses fell in.” Soon England’s once-great metropolis lay submerged beneath “a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.”

Why death? Because decayed human corpses, sewer waste and other pollutants have created a chemical soup that exudes a poisonous yellow vapor. To breathe it for long is fatal. In fact, the wise shun all the cities once inhabited by “the ancients” because the ruins bring on ague and fever.

In the first five chapters of his book, Jefferies, one of great Victorian nature essayists, surveys the new flora, fauna and geography of this blasted future England. However, he then shifts gears to depict the feudalistic society that eventually emerged from the ruined land. His hero, Felix Aquila, is that familiar mainstay of fantasy and science fiction - the sensitive and inquisitive scion of a noble family, who can read the old books and has begun to tinker and invent things. Still, the impoverished Aquilas and their retainers count on a sturdy stockade and constant vigilance to stay safe. The men always carry spears or bows to defend themselves against “bushmen”- the vicious, atavistic descendants of criminals and beggars - or even occasional marauders from Wales and Ireland.

In love with the beautiful Aurora, Felix knows that their chances of marrying are slim: The girl’s father wants her to wed a foppish courtier from the local prince’s inner circle. So, desperate to gain a fortune and Aurora, Felix constructs a boat in which to explore the immense lake - really an inner sea - that now dominates the center of England.

Like any slightly bumbling fantasy hero, Felix suffers numerous mishaps and misadventures, which are entertaining enough, but they don’t prepare the reader for the high point of Jefferies’s book: The Dantesque chapters in which the young fortune-seeker unknowingly enters the miasmic swamp that used to be London.