The future Britain looks medieval in Robert Harris’s dystopian tale. But who ruined everything?
“All of my books are about power,” Robert Harris acknowledged in a recent interview. While that power is most often political – the fall of a charismatic former prime minister in The Ghost, Chamberlain’s struggle for peace in Munich, the failure of the Roman republic in his wonderful Cicero trilogy – he has explored its perils in other, more insidious guises: technology in The Fear Index, religion in Conclave, the devastating force of nature in Pompeii. What connects them all is a preoccupation with power at its overweening apogee, on the brink of combustion and collapse. Charged always with contemporary resonance, it is a fascination that in his best books comes unsettlingly close to prescience.
The Second Sleep is driven by the same preoccupation. Described as a “genre-bending thriller”, it appears to open conventionally enough “late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to officiate at the burial of a village priest. An hour’s ride past a market town where “three executed felons hung rotting from their gibbets”, his aged horse sliding on the muddy road, he is afraid that he has been misdirected; that he will be caught out of doors after curfew, risking a night in jail. By the time he finally reaches his destination, he is determined to conclude his unpleasant business as swiftly as he is able.
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