The Death of Grass (Radio Drama)

This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Christopher's 1956 novel 'The Death of Grass' was broadcast in 2009 in five fifteen minute episodes that tells the story of John Custance, his family and their friends as they race across country to reach his brother's remote farm hoping to find refuge from the deadly global blight that has killed all forms of grasses and plunged the world into famine and genocidal chaos.

Narrated by David Mitchell and with a cast including Darrell Brockis as John, Bruce Alexander as the terrifyingly pragmatic Pirrie and Rebecca Egan as Ann Custance, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation keeping to the same time period so the post war callousness and the 1950s sexual politics of the original have not been updated to align with modern sensibilities.  The unrelenting bleakness of Christopher's story means this is not necessarily a fun way to spend an hour but it's certainly an engaging one as this tale of selfishness and survival remains a powerful experience that still raises as many questions now as it did almost 70 years ago.

 

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Welsh Tales of Terror

R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Fontana Books

Inside what is probably the single most stereotypical portrayal of Welsh cliches ever to adorn a book cover this anthology of stories set in Wales, written by Welsh writers or regarding Welsh folklore turned out to be utterly fantastic.

Let's start by getting the various folktales out of the way.  These, here, take the form of teeny little half page stories relating things like 'The Brown Hobgoblin of Bedd Gelert', 'Dead Man's Candles', 'The Devil's Tree', 'Corpse Candles' and more.  They're fun little hints at the depth of Welsh folklore but little more than that.  For those wishing for a more in depth examination that's catered for with a chapter taken from Marie Trevelyan's early 20th century study 'Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales' that explores the phenomena of the 'Ceffyl-dwr' in 'Water Horses and the Spirits of the Mist'.

Arthur Machen

So, onto the stories.  There are a number of very enjoyable stories here but the book is helped no end by an exemplary opening trio of tales.  First up is Glyn Jones' 'Jordan', a story of an attempted swindle and the grim and unpleasant fate that befalls the perpetrators.  The second story is by one of my favourite authors, John Christopher, and is the first thing of his I've read that was neither science-fiction nor post-apocalyptic.  'A Cry of Children' is a subtle and deeply moving story with a brutal and breathtaking finale.  The golden trio culminates with Arthur Machen's 'The Shining Pyramid' with its folk horror and proto-Lovecraftian rural horrors from beyond.

There's a bit of a dip next with Angus Wilson's 'Animals or Human Beings' which despite being written in a very agreeable and jaunty style has a story that really does nothing interesting which is also the case with the ghost story 'The Man on a Bike' by Hazel F. Looker that follows it.

Regular readers of my write-us will know that I'm a bit of a sucker for a happy story and so in many ways 'The Morgan Trust' by Richard Bridgeman (a pseudonym of sci-fi writer L.P. Davies) ticked lots of my boxes with its story of a man on an obsessive quest finding what he's looking for in two remote Welsh towns.

Caradoc Evans

Obsession is also at the heart of two more tales of Caradoc Evans' 'Be This Her Memorial' takes religious fervour in a small town to its extreme and 'The Lost Gold Mine' by Hazel F. Looker has a more obvious object of fascination.

Dorothy K. Haynes' contribution 'Mrs Jones' is a repurposed folktale of a woman kidnapped and forced to cook for the little folk of Gower.  It's lifted from the doldrums by the matching belligerence of both its victim and her erstwhile rescuer whose dislike of the woman and her domineering ways could be her downfall.

Ronald Seth's 'The Reverend John James and the Ghostly Horseman' is another story that feels like a repurposed folktale but unlike its predecessor has little charm or wit in its telling.

The books second story by Glyn Jones, 'Cadi Hughes', is a bit of a disappointment after the opener.  It has a great opening and a couple of fun moments but is ultimately a bit cruel and vindictive.

Richard Hughes

The final three tales pretty much capture the Wales I grew up in the 1970s dealing as they do with coal mining, religion and folk horror.  Jack Griffith deals with the first of these as he traps a group of men underground in 'Black Goddess' and we're left to decide for ourselves whether the supernatural aspect is more real than the insanity.  'The Stranger' by Richard Hughes drops a small demon into the household of a preacher and his peg-legged wife.  It tries for laughs amidst the temptations and the piety but I thought it all got more than a little jumbled at the end.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes

The book closes with editor R. Chetwynd-Hayes' own contribution, 'Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn'.  It's the most 1970s thing here by far as it's Regency period setting and wild snowy moorland setting filled with obnoxious aristocrats, cackling peasants, beautiful maidens and ancient powers put me in mind of so many of my favourite Hammer movies.

I know there are lots of other books in this series covering different areas of the country (and indeed parts of the world) compiled by different editors all of which are now on my wants list but truthfully they are all going to have to be something special to live up to this one.

The Lotus Caves

John Christopher
Puffin Books

Fleeing the claustrophobic artificiality of the Moon Bubble, 14-year-olds Marty & Steve illegally reconnoiter-the long-abandoned 1st Station &, following a clue in the journal of "never recovered" Andrew Thurgood, plunge their mechanical crawler into a fragrant, fertile warren of caves. There the enveloping moss & branches, the moving, metamorphosizing leaves & undergrowth are all part of one gigantic sentient Plant which has also provided, for the surviving Thurgood, a lush earth-like orchard & an orchestra tree programmed to play his favorite (now 70-year-old) tunes. The Plant will pamper them until, like the Odyssey's lotus-eaters, they'll relinquish all thoughts of escape. Marty's fight against euphoria, which involves arousing the lethargic, Plant-worshipping Thurgood, is quickly told--more quickly than the Lunarians-at-school episode at the beginning.

I've been bingeing on John Christopher books over the last year or so and I have a few still on the shelf.  Of the ones I've read 'Empty World' remains my favourite of all his YA books ('Death of Grass' of the others in case you were wondering).  This is another of the former type and is by far the weakest of all that I've read.

'The Lotus Caves' is the story of two boys, Marty and Steve, residents of 'The Bubble' a moon colony where life is regimented and unexciting.  Bored to tears due to the punishment for a prank pulled the two jump at an opportunity to go for an illicit jaunt in one of the surface vehicles.  Once out in the wilds of the moon they, through an unlikely sequence of events find themselves trapped in the underground domain of a sentient extra-terrestrial plant.

It's not a great read.  The core concept is weak and there's little to hang onto as the book progresses but the finale when it arrives picks up the pace considerably and the ending of the book is by far the most enjoyable part of the whole thing.

I kind of always knew I was going to struggle getting into this as I do prefer my sci-fi earth bound and preferably within Britain (hence this blog).  This was none of those but it was interesting to read a John Christopher book that took his imagination well beyond it's usual boundaries and that can never be a bad thing even if the end result is a rather mediocre thing.

The Guardians

John Christopher
Puffin Books

Set in the year 2052, the novel depicts a future, authoritarian England divided into two distinct societies: the modern, overpopulated "Conurbs" and the aristocratic, rarefied "County"; the former consists of crowded city districts and all-pervasive technology while the latter is made up of manors and rolling countrysides typical of 19th-century England. The novel follows a young Conurban named Rob as he comes to experience life in both worlds, uncovering truths and choosing sides in the process.

The beginning of the cold weather brought a desire to disappear into the clutches of an old favourite and having read both 'Empty World' and 'The World in Winter' fairly recently another John Christopher seemed like the way to go.

In 'The Guardians' we have what in many ways is a book that, rather unexpectedly, explores similar ground to 'Nineteen Eighty Four' particularly in the books denouement.

Young Rob Randall, born into a working class family in an industrial town (or 'Conurb') and raised by father, is essentially different from both his peers and the other inhabitants of the Conurb, isolated by his bookishness and by his loner tendencies.  Orphaned early on in the book and sent to an extremely strict boarding school from which he promptly legs it Rob finds sanctuary in the anachronistic idyll of the 'Country'.  As Rob makes the transition between the two worlds he is very much caught up in all his new life has to offer whilst conversely his arrival offers new perspectives for his new Country friend, Mike, and so as Rob finds refuge and friendship with Mike's kindly family things slowly start to spiral out of control.

For much of the book this is very much an examination of both class and the city / country divide.  The Conurb dwellers are ill-educated, brutal, obsessed by violent sports and dismissive of those they feel to be lazy and purposeless Country snobs.  For their part the Country dwellers are idle and rich, entertaining themselves with parties, athletic sports days, hunts, hobbies and gossip and are dismissive of the boorish, violent, uncouth Conurb folk.

It's an almost typical Christopher novel in that it hares along with his easy prose carrying you through the book yet it also feels slightly unfinished; not so much in terms of the book itself but rather unfinished as a story.  You are left with the suspicion that Christopher was leaving the door open for a sequel that never happened.  Also there are marked similarities here to the French chateau sequence in the first of his Tripods trilogy, 'The White Mountains'.

As ever though this is a perfectly enjoyable read that manages to create a fairly honest and realistic(ish) world and a fun little story in a very limited number of pages. It's far from being one of his best but when nothing else offers itself up it's well worth an evening of your time.

The World in Winter

John Christopher
Penguin Books

The World in Winter is the terrorising story of what happens when a new Ice Age devastates the Northern Hemisphere, when civilisation disappears into a voiceless polar night, when men and women turn into wolf packs in their agonised struggle for survival.

 A few years ago before I started writing this blog I listened to an audiobook of John Christopher's other, more famous, apocalypse novel, 'The Death of Grass'.  It's a brutal and uncompromising story that showed the ease in which social conventions crumble and morality is cast aside in the pursuit of survival.

'The World in Winter' is a perfect companion piece.  Here it's a new ice age that has wreaked devastation on the UK, along with the rest of Europe and the US, but has left the African nations untouched.  This turn of events results in hordes of refugees making their way south and the balance of power tipping in favour of the former colonial subjects over their disenfranchised former masters.

We view this change of circumstances through the eyes of one Andrew Leedon a film maker evacuated from London to Nigeria.  There he finds himself in drastically reduced circumstances before a simple act of kindness made some years before comes to his aid.

Where 'The Death of Grass' is a story of a group of people finding refuge and a hope for survival within a devastated environment this book tells a different story.  It tells of power, control and revenge but it also tells of ideas of intolerance and racism and at times makes brutally uncomfortable reading in the language it uses and the attitudes expressed.  Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between what is intentional and what is a product of the time the book was written (1962) and a reflection of the concerns of the times as Britain's former colonies break free of it's governance and the sun seems to be finally setting on an empire still not entirely recovered from the deprivations on the second World War.  

It's a novel that is bleak in setting, events, attitude, outlook and execution that I found to be a compulsive but not necessarily enjoyable read that, I think, will haunt me for some time to come.

Buy it here - The World in Winter (Penguin Worlds)

Empty World

John Christopher
Heinemann New Windmill

When Neil survives a deadly plague and plunges into solitude, he must question everything in this gripping adventure from critically acclaimed Tripods author John Christopher.
Neil’s world is shattered when he and his family are involved in a horrible car accident that leaves him an orphan. He is sent to live in a small village with his grandparents, whom he loves but doesn’t really know.
Soon, a devastating illness, the Calcutta Plague, begins making the headlines. After killing thousands of people in India in just a few months, the disease begins to spread much farther, quickly sweeping across the world and eventually settling in the same village where Neil resides. The sickness is a strange one, affecting only the adults and none of the children, and soon Neil finds himself an orphan once more.
Alone, Neil travels to London in search of other survivors of the plague. There he finds a strange world of fear and suspicion, where friends can be enemies and people will do anything to survive. In this time of strife, amid the excitement and loneliness of his solitude, can Neil find a way to focus on what matters most?

John Christopher

John Christopher took the opportunity to destroy the world on a number of occasions and a good few of his best novels are set either during and immediately following the apocalypse - 'The Death of Grass', 'The World in Winter' - or are set any number of years into the 'post' and tell of the various new societies that have formed in the aftermath - The Guardians', 'The Tripod tetralogy'.  This one is from the former camp.

Published in 1977 'Empty World' is a young adult novel that takes teenager Neil Miller from the automobile accident deaths of his family through the deaths of the rest of the world caused by the virulent Calcutta Plague and Neil's solitary quest for other survivors and up to the point where he begins a new life.

It's a lovely little book with a protagonist who is emotionally distant and so able to carry us through the horrors of the narrative including madness, suicide, mrderous jealousy and the lingering deaths of two small children.  

It is far too short and would certainly have benefitted from being allowed to expand it's exploration of this new world but I am quibbling as this was a most enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.

Buy it here - Empty World

The Tripods

The Tripods is a 1984 adaptation of the first two novels in John Christopher's series of novels, 'The Tripods'.  It tells the story of a world ruled by the 'Masters' in their huge metal three legged walking machines (the Tripods) and the adventures of the three young men who rebel against their 'capping'  - the method by which the Masters assert their control over the populace - and travel across the UK and France to join the free men in the 'White Mountains'.

The first series of 13 episodes tells of Will (John Shackley) and his cousin Henry (Jim Baker) who for fear of losing their independence as a result of the capping flee their English village home after meeting a 'vagrant' who tells them of the free men in the White Mountains of France.  Along the way they are helped by another young man Jean-Paul or Beanpole (Ceri Seel) who then travels with them to their destination.

The second series follows Will's exploits within the city of the Masters as he attempts to gather information that will help to defeat them.

With the third series never coming to fruition the show ends on a somewhat anti-climactic note but don't let that put you off.  The Tripods is a lovely piece of 1980s British sci fi television.  Like other sci fi serials of the time (Day of the Triffids, Quatermass) it's qualities belay the stylistic and technological drawbacks of the era that hit other series so hard (Doctor Who).  The Tripods themselves are reasonably accomplished, as are the Masters and their city.  Some of the acting from the predominantly young cast is a little naive but improves over the course of the two series. There are moments where things get a little bogged down - their stay in the chateau goes on for far too long - but there are other times where you wish they'd lingered longer - the devastated remains of Paris - but the show gains kudos for remaining pretty close to it's source material and providing a cohesive and focused narrative over the course of so many episodes.

I'm not able to embed the video but you can watch the series here...

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1uz4ov
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The Martians and Us: The History Of British Science Fiction

Narrated by the 12th Doctor, Peter Capaldi this three part BBC series from 2006 covers many of the classics of the genre - both written and filmed - trying to put them in some sort of context of the times they were written and the lives of their authors. 

Episode 1: From Apes to Aliens explores the dawn of the science age with particular attention to H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon and Arthur C. Clarke who appears here as one of the talking heads along with Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, Brian Stapleford, Kim Newman and others.

Episode 2: Trouble in Paradise (Dystopias) discusses the British talent for imagining the most hideous dystopian societies looking particularly at the two masters, Aldous Huxley & George Orwell along with Nigel Kneale's 'The Year of the Sex Olympics', 'A Clockwork Orange' and '1985' by Anthony Burgess and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale'. 

Episode 3: The End of the World as We Know It closes the series with a look at my personal favourite of all the sci fi genres, the apocalypse and it's aftermath.  Within this episode we visit my favourite book, John Wyndham's 'The Day of the Triffids' along with John Christopher's superb 'The Death of Grass', J. G. Ballard's 'The Drowned World' and TV apocalypses Survivors, Threads and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

It's a beautifully made documentary that takes both time and care to present a well rounded examination of it's subject matter through the words of the authors themselves, their contemporaries and a smattering of academics.  The very nature of the beast means that much is omitted and books are very much the focus over TV and film, which is no bad thing, but it is thoroughly enjoyable and filled with tantalising insights into many of the defining works of British SF literature.

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