Nigel Kneale - Quatermass (1979)

 

As you may possibly recall, Quatermass IV was televised before it was novelised with this hitting the shops soon after. The scripts for the three previous serials had been published as paperbacks but this was a proper novelisation; and Nigel Kneale really knew his way around a typewriter so it's up there with the best of John Wyndham more than it's comparable with Fred Hoyle's ham fisted Ian Fleming impersonations. The prose is tight and swiftly-paced as you would most likely expect of a tie-in, but with just the right mix of grimly poetic flair to immerse the reader in truly harrowing visions of a dystopian near future extrapolated from the world of the late seventies. Youth gangs such as the Badders and the Blues terrorise the urban environment without quite drawing on the corny punk rock clichés doing the rounds in other dystopias of the time, and what civilisation remains hangs on a thread with law and order enforced by Pay Cops, a brutal South African contract security force. Television, seemingly the only remaining form of mass communication, is reduced to something like pirate productions limited to either news or populist garbage such as The Tittupy Bumpity Show with its outsized genital props doubtless extrapolated from a failure to understand what made Frankie Howerd funny. Meanwhile, a barely comprehensible alien machine has begun to harvest humanity's youth in great numbers, with those chosen running eagerly to their doom with all the guileless fervour of Heaven's Gate cultists anticipating hanging out with Captain Picard.

The ageing Professor Quatermass stumbles through these ruins, never quite sure where he is, dipping into reverie of times past, and ill-equipped to cope with anything of this cowardly and brutal new world while nevertheless hanging onto his grasp of science for dear life. He's bewildered, angry, and stale, the polar opposite of the action hero, even of Frank Miller's greying Dark Knight; and neither is Quatermass IV the typical action thriller neatly solving its puzzle box of modular problems. Here the action is mostly basic survival against terrible odds as the pensioner stumbles through an increasingly desperate sequence of events concluding with a hair's breadth reprieve brought about by our guy's tragically inevitable sacrifice. It may lack the brute force of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but it doesn't fall too far short and is frankly no fucking picnic.

Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it hasn't dated, and its focus on the breakdown of society remains as relevant now as  then.

'The past is more important.'

That's what she had said, quoting Joe Kapp's Clare. And he had denied it, meaning that it ought not to be. But it was. In the end, it was all a person was made of, like the skeleton he'd grown.

Reviews of the time were what you would expect, characterising Kneale as an angry old man shaking his fist at clouds, nowhere near so good as Blake's fucking Seven because if we've learned anything from this last century it's that new stuff is amazing and old people are boring, yeah? No-one really appreciates you pointing out when something everybody else likes is bollocks. They may say they do, but really they don't, and Kneale wasn't taking any prisoners here, which I personally find very refreshing. Quatermass IV is horror as much as it's science-fiction, concerned as it is with mass psychology and the extinction of the individual, a theme which ran through the previous three television serials; and the more we've convinced ourselves we're living in the best of all possible worlds, the less we like to hear claims to the contrary, and particularly not those so eloquent and so free of the taint of reaction as was this.

The Death of Grass

John Christopher The Death of Grass (1956)
A classic, I was reliably informed, and so - having already been impressed by two of Christopher's Tripods novels - I kept an eye open, eventually finding a US edition retitled No Blade of Grass with a cover promising the heaving of bosoms and stuff; and it is a classic, and a classic very much in the mold of a John Wyndham novel wherein stiff upper lipped types try to get by in a world ruined by agency of a massive global disaster. The difference, as Brian Aldiss clearly took great pleasure in pointing out, is that the upper lips of Christopher's protagonists soon lose their stiffness. In Trillion Year Spree, his history of science-fiction literature, Aldiss berates Wyndham for writing cosy catastrophes wherein the central characters have a jolly old romp despite the alien invasion, end of civilisation, or whatever, additionally praising Christopher for putting his own cast of survivors through a genuinely harrowing meat grinder of a tale.

Anyway, what we have is the destruction of the ecosystem through a virus which kills grass in all of its forms, notably including wheat, corn, and rice. So humanity is fucked, no more bread, and not much upon which livestock can graze, and civilisation collapses, and it looks as though the government have dropped atomic bombs on the larger cities in hope of reducing the population to numbers which might stand a better chance of long term survival. We follow Christopher's protagonists across country as they make for the sanctuary of an isolated valley one of them recalls from childhood. They have guns, they pick up strays, they encounter other roving bands of scavengers, and then it all turns unexpectedly bleak as they meet Jane's family, kill them in self defence, then debate whether it would be kinder to kill the aforementioned Jane than leave her to be raped by the next bunch to stumble upon the house. So it's a long way from being anything you could describe as cosy.

That being said, I think the cosy catastrophe label is a little unfair, and while it might apply to some of Wyndham's writing, I really don't see it with Triffids or Kraken; and on the other hand, whilst the people of The Death of Grass find themselves thrust into a world in which conventional morality will get you killed, we're nevertheless dealing with persons who would romp under other circumstances, and whose post-apocalyptic survival strategies serve as contrast to a lost golden age of traditional middle class values. Chaps are in charge and hoping things don't get too beastly, whilst women are to be protected because they can cook and bear children. The novel takes a dim view of humanity bordering on misanthropic whilst being slightly hamstrung by its harking back to moral values which arguably weren't that amazing in the first place.

Of course, it's still a great novel, and significantly one which was rewritten by Cormac McCarthy as The Road - a genuinely harrowing trawl through a similar apocalypse with a better grounding in basic humanity, less of the retired colonel, and which otherwise makes The Death of Grass look like some bloody awful Terry Nation effort.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy The Road (2006)
It's been a while since a book lived up to its hype for me, including even just the recommendation of friends as hype in this instance; but The Road turns out to be even better than promised. It doesn't really have much of a story, just some guy and his boy trudging through a post-apocalyptic wasteland towards some ambiguous possibility of a better life which almost certainly won't happen. The blurb on the back cover promises it to be a tale of love - man and child looking after each other under dreadful conditions - which it sort of is, although the description is unfortunately twee and a little misleading.

The nature of whatever has destroyed the planet is never discussed and probably doesn't matter. Our two survivors get by on what canned goods they can salvage in a world of grey skies, ash, snow, and death - nothing is left growing, and there don't seem to be any animals, and occasionally we are afforded a thoroughly stomach churning glimpse of how other survivors are getting by; and this all serves as dramatic contrast to two people actually trying to keep each other alive. It's simple, but it's really all you need given that this is one of the most depressing and harrowing things I've read in a while, albeit in a good way, sort of.

Weirdly, all the negative criticism I've seen of The Road seems to fixate on how it is written. McCarthy eschews chapters, most contractions, and even conventional sentence structure to yield something which reads very much like an extended poem, or at least a novel rendered as such. The form of the narrative serves to concentrate all actions within the present. There is no longer a future, nor any real past, just cold, brutal reality. The apocalypse has come and gone - and as such no longer matters - and the future will probably be worse, so all that is left is to move forward and hope that it won't be. I suppose it might be argued that this harks back to the earliest literature, things like Beowulf which was similarly composed as epic poetry and might even be seen as casting its characters into roughly the same hostile territory. Whatever the case, I don't think The Road would have worked so well as regular prose.