Remembering the Future Past

For my holiday reading I chose Robert Harris’ novel The Second Sleep (2019), because it sounded very intriguing. The novel opens with a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, riding through Wessex across an apparently medieval landscape, hindered by weather and terrain. But very quickly Harris begins to drop clues to the reader that things are not what they seem. Fairfax hears parakeets. In medieval England? When he arrives at a remote parsonage to conduct the funeral of the late priest, the place is full of subtle anachronisms, culminating in his discovery of a cabinet of ancient artifacts in the old priest’s study. The most fascinating item: a battered iPhone.

I love the way the novel blends genre. It feels like historical fiction, drawing not just on the medieval, but also the nineteenth century to create the world in which Fairfax resides. But it is actually set in the future, making it a curious hybrid, apocalypse fiction, but with the feel of alternative history, and a bit of murder mystery thrown in for good measure. The point of divergence in the early 2020s is in the future, but also in the distant past. Whatever happened, happened so long ago that there is no recorded memory to explain it. But during the second dark age that followed, the Church has come to prominence and now dominates, with an even tighter grip on society than in the first middle-ages, reminding me a little of Kingsley Amis’ alternative history novel, The Alteration (1976).

The title refers to the archaic common practice of dividing the night into two sleeps, with a period of activity and wakefulness in the middle and this is used symbolically throughout, perhaps to suggest epochs of sleep and of wakefulness in which humanity works to destroy itself. There are a range of possible explanations for the apocalypse. Although this novel pre-dates Covid, pandemic is certainly one of them, but war, and the threat of out-of-control technologies offer equally convincing answers. Yet it is the threat posed by technology that looms largest. Most of the artifacts uncovered in illicit archaeological digs are instantly recognisable to the reader as the electronic clutter of the modern world. This is blamed for the historic disaster, and it is impossible not to think about the current fears relating to the development AI technologies and the potential negative impacts of such on the world around us. All the artifacts are demonised, but that does not prevent the beginnings of a second industrial revolution taking root in the village.

My own novel, The Solace of the Common People, plays with genre in similar ways, having dual narratives, one in the medieval world and one in the near future, so Harris’ use of similar devices really drew me in. I always enjoy his books, and this one did not disappoint, offering much food for thought about the world we live in today.