carandol

I'm totally amazed that I've never heard of this book before. Written in 1920, it's a dystopia which prefigures many of the ideas in more well-known books such as Brave New World and 1984. I'd be very surprised if Huxley and Orwell hadn't read it. The book is set in the 2150s. In the past of this world, the era following the First World War was the Era of the League of Nations, a time when the democracies of the world faced off against the communist dictatorships. But then, in 1986, a resurgent Germany attempted to conquer the world again, and World War Two broke out. This raged on for a long time, but the rest of the world pulled together, and Germany was reduced to a single city, Berlin, an underground city under a thick concrete cap, protected from invasion by an unbeatable ray weapon. This has been so for the last hundred years. The rest of the world is at peace under a World Government, but no-one knows what conditions are like in Berlin.

Our hero, a chemical engineer, manages to get into the underground city, where he is able to pose as a German scientist whom he resembles closely. Through his eyes, we see the "Dark Utopia" of German Imperial Socialism. It is a society which bears many resemblances to Nazi ideology as it came to be -- eugenics, the creation of race of German supermen, the reduction of women to the roles of mother or whore, the ambition to wipe out the "lesser" races of the world, rule by a dictator (in this case a descendant of the Hohenzollerns) supposedly as representative of the people, total war as a way to strengthen the race. Boy are brought up to hate their enemies and show no "weaker" emotions such as pity or love. (Indeed, there's a scene in a school where the boys are encouraged to express their hatred which is reminiscent of a scene in 1984). The viewpoint character works his way up through the ranks of the middle class technocrats, using his knowledge of chemistry from the outside world to amaze the German scientists. He is granted breeding rights (he is expect to choose one woman from three suitable mates chosen by the government), allowed to visit the Level of Free Women (basically a very large brothel), and is eventually elevated to the ranks of Royalty for his good works. Of course, during this time he is finding people who want to overthrow the status quo, and following an ending which owes more to pulp fiction than great literature, it all ends happily.

One thing that has occured to me is that if the traits of German society portrayed here could be extrapolated from the real Germany in 1920, would Germany have ended up with some form of Nazism even without Hitler? This book can't be called great literature, but it's an enjoyable and thought-provoking read and I'm surprised it's not better known in the annals of dystopian fiction

Cross-posted from www.mobileread.com

I don't quite know how I managed to miss this book when it was first published in 1978; it's just the sort of stuff I loved in my late teens, and still have a soft spot for even now, when perhaps I should know better.

The first in a trilogy, and Richard Herley's first novel, it tells the story of Tagart, last survivor of a nomadic tribe living in the south of England in neolithic times, whose family and friends have been wiped out by the local farmers. Tagart, with nothing else to live for, decides it is his duty to destroy the village, one of the increasing number of agricultural settlements which are clearing woodland and restricting the movements of nomadic peoples in this period.

What follows is a somewhat bloodthirsty series of encounters between Tagart and the villagers, who increasingly see the nomad as Tsoaul, the spirit of the forest, who they feel they have angered. But just at the point when you're starting to think all this ingenious killing is getting a bit much (I mean, you can't help feeling for his loss, but there are limits!) the plot takes a twist when Tagart is captured by slavers and dragged off to Valdoe, where the leader known as the Flint Lord rules over a huge slave colony which mines flint and trades it all across the south of England. More adventure ensues and the book gallops through a series of tense encounters that keep you turning the pages (or clicking the iLiad page bar in my case) to the end.

Herley has a good feel for the natural world in his descriptions of the landscape and its flora and fauna. I'm not qualified to comment on the authenticity of his neolithic culture and technology, but it certainly came across convincingly. The author also seems to be worryingly knowledgeable about home-made man-traps; I'll certainly not be wandering about his garden in the dark!

There were a few little niggles; one was his tendency to use scientific terms (such as the hunting dogs being able to sniff out the molecules of their quarry) which occasionally jolted me out of the neolithic setting. And then there was the hunting hawk with bells on it jesses; I couldn't help wondering what the bells were made of in a society whose main manufacturing materials were stone, clay, wood and bone. But those are minor points, and it is a first novel.

All in all an enjoyable and believable adventure in a small corner of prehistoric England, and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for the best regional novel of 1978.

Interestingly, the author is re-publishing this, and the rest of his novels as “shareware”; if you like the book, he suggests you give him the princely sum of 85p, which seems fair enough to me, and ought to be encouraged.

The other two books in the trilogy are The Flint Lord and The Earth Goddess.