The Second Sleep (2019)
336pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-11-02
The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. I needed something light – my birthday’s next week so didn’t want to have to wait to read birthday books – and Robert Harris is usually readable and quick. I enjoyed the Cicero books (esp 1 & 2) and Enigma which I read earlier in the year was fine. This one I did not like.
The Second Sleep is the story of a priest in a post apocalyptic Britain who discovers a heretical interest in the past. As the positive Guardian review points out…
Harris’s bleak imagined world issues a clarion call to the present, urging us to recognise the value of progress, the importance of woolly concepts like liberalism and the rule of law, and all the other ideals we’ve spent generations fighting for yet seem prepared to sacrifice on the altar of populism
This is the kind of ‘speculative fiction’ (not science fiction, God forbid!) written by people who are pleased to observe that the genre is ‘really all about today’ as if a) that’s some kind of a revelation and b) that’s all there is to it. More: It’s a piece of genre fiction that isn’t aware of its genre.
My hunch is that to be successful the author of a piece genre fiction needs to be aware of the genre that it exists within. 1) this allows the author to leverage implicit knowledge of the genre to build a rich imaginary world and people it with believable characters and 2) it allows the ideas to exist in dialogue with similar sets of ideas previously raised within the genre (c.f. Gene Wolfe for an author that does ti really well) 3) it prevents the piece from being a tired re-tread.
Unfortunately, Harris doesn’t really appear to have much more than a passing familiarity with the genre in which he’s writing and so ends up producing the most basic version. The whole thing moves briskly towards it’s predictable conclusion but I could hardly be bothered. It’s has all the wonder and surprise of a walk to the post office. The world seemed thinly sketched and there’s no sense of loss that the best type of this story can so ably elicit (Ridley Walker!). Un-recommended! *
* also worth noting Harris’s ‘reasonable’ liberal centrism is full on display here – which is not really my cup of tea. I mean I probably have more time for New Labour than much of the current left but that’s more out of electoral pragmatism (I would have taken any iteration of the New Labour project over any one of the successive Tory governments) than any feeling of ideological kinship.