The Tide Went Out - Charles Eric Maine

 

I have written before on this blog about the twisted road that led me to the speculative fiction of Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain, 1921-81).  His writing career really only covered the Fifties and Sixties but he was at the top of his game from the outset and for a time was up there with John Wyndham, John Christopher and the young J G Ballard.  Like them, he tended towards the eco-disaster, which is what The Tide Went Out is.

It is 1958 (Maine is always contemporaneous) and US A-Bomb tests have gone too far.  A sub-ocean blast has cracked the Earth's crust and all the water is seeping away.  Philip Wade is seconded from the science weekly he edits and placed at the secret governmental hub in London's Kingsway (I suspect at the former General Electric building where the BBC started out) to produce sanitised news for the Press.  Officially the world's combined efforts and trying to pump water back from the core.  In reality, there is nothing they can do and ninety percent or more of the population is going to die very soon.  Wade's family, and the families of other personnel chosen to survive, have been taken to polar camps where there is still plenty of ice.

Maine paints a vivid portrait of London at the time as society slowly begins to crumble.  Barricades go up and the army comes in to protect the elite from the masses, and soon the soldiers go rogue too, but with all the weaponry they can want.

Maine explores the key questions we are currently asking about the COVID pandemic.  Why have we so crazily damaged the only world we have?  Who chooses the elite?  Can we trust anything the government tells us?

Another well-selected reprint from the British Library.

A Wrinkle in the Skin - John Christopher

A Wrinkle in the Skin, A Terrible Title, is a 1965 disaster novel by John Christopher (Sam Youd), creator of the Tripods and author of the classic The Death of Grass.

Christopher has enjoyed something of a revival since his death in 2012. He is regarded as a prophet of ecological disasrer, which is certainly the case with The Death of Grass and The World in Winter. A Wrinkle in the Skin is certainly global but the disaster is not man-made. Vast earthquakes have reshaped the Earth, to the extent that the English Channel has dried up. The tidal wave that accompanied the quakes has wiped away coastal cities like Southampton and Bournemouth.

Our hero, Matthew Cotter, grows tomatoes on Guernsey. The quake makes a mess of his glasshouses but he is unscathed. He wanders about the island and finds others who have survived. They are very few, but they group together, find food and start to make a sort of life. Matthew, however, is determined to find his daughter Jane who he knows spent the night of the apocalypse in East Sussex. So he sets out to walk there, there being no deep water to stop him., accompanied by the orphaned boy Billy.

This is unfortunate - mature man and immature child on a mission of discovery has become a cliche of post-apocalyptic fiction (The Road, for example). To be fair, Christopher wrote in 1965 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cliche back then. So they meet a mad king (actually a sailor, the solitary survivor on an oil tanker stranded on the dry bottom of the Channel, desperately trying to keep everything literally shipshape. They meet a Preacher, a visionary of the apocalypse who foresees the Risen Christ approaching from the East. And they meet other groups, good and bad and extremely bad. It's all a bit predictable - except that I liked the ambition of making the ship a supertanker, I liked that the religious crazy was a hospitable host, and I really liked April, the sole female character who is fully characterised. There is a conversation between April and Cotter which is both shocking and moving - which inspires Matthew to pursue his quest to the bitter end (another excellent twist) and the scales to finally fall from his eyes.

A good book, then, not as significant as some of Christopher's others but effective and skillfully done.

When The Killing's Done - T C Boyle

Ten years ago I happened upon T C Boyle, who had by then wisely stopped calling himself T Coraghessan Boyle, thus accelerating his international sales. I began with Drop City and quickly read most of his other novels up to Water Music, which I considered his best. I stopped because I was obviously reading them faster than he was writing them. Now, something like five years since I read Water Music, I found this, Boyle's 2011 eco-novel.

Essentially, the premise is this: a series of women, earth mothers all, become involved with two islands in a chain of four off the coast of California. All are intent, one way or another, in perpetuating the natural haven which is their romantic view of the islands. The thing is, society's view of what is natural changes with the generations.

The contemporary storyline is that of Alma Takesue, a eco-scientist in charge of re-naturalising the islands. This involves ruthlessly expunging all non-native fauna like the rampaging razorback pigs left over from previous attempts at farming. This prompts rich slacker Dave LaJoy, who once had a disastrous first date with Alma, to launch a protest movement, and when the courts dismiss his claims, to resort to practical sabotage.

Dave's girfriend Anise was brought up on the island where her mother was cook to a half-baked sheep farming operation. The mother, Rita, was a former hippy musician. Alma' grandmother Beverley was the only survivor of a shipwreck off the islands in the late 1940s, when pregnant with Alma's mother Katherine. Katherine lost her husband diving for sea urchin in the same waters. Alma's partner Tim has a simpler answer to the prospect of becoming a father. He simply leaves.

Boyle is at his best with a diverse cast of characters taking diametrically opposed stands on the same issue, especially when, as here, he can roam over a number of time periods. When The Killing's Done is thought-provoking on the subject of interference with nature. Dave LaJoy is a typical Boyle bull-in-a-china-shop loser and great fun. The sole problem is Alma, a really annoying sanctimonious self-centered prig. I'm afraid I wanted to skip any section that started with her, though I'm glad I didn't.