This book was given me by Woohoo, who seems to be something of a John Christopher expert. With such a recommendation, I really ought to read it!

Thirteen years on, I finally got round to reading this!

I'll start - unusually for me - with the blurb on the back cover.

"Not science-fiction but terror-probability, as the England that we know ... is thrown into violent convulsions by an economic depression ....

"For those that can remember [the Great Depression] it is something to be accepted. But for the young, it is a call to strike. Gangs of hooligans rampage throughout the land bringing in their wake a bitterness and anger that is almost sub-human.

"Action, as always, produces reaction. The pendulum swings yet again, but the stability that follows is that of supra-discipline, of grim religious retaliation.'

The first thing that struck me - and which made me slightly uneasy - is that Christopher is trying to write gritty near-future realistic prediction. But he is writing in 1968, and the setting is therefore the 1970s - a period I can dimly remember. And the disjuncture between his imagined early 1970s, with devaluation of the currency followed by anarchy, and my memories of decimalisation and two general elections on the trot, respectively, is rather unsettling in a way he probably didn't intend.

A second observation is the way it is presented, with different viewpoint characters coming in and out partway through their stories, which reminds me of the plotless realist writing of the period - and slightly later. However, it is not plotless, and the plot feels rather unbalanced, dealing in detail with the swing into anarchy and the period of mob rule, and rather cursorily with the religious revolution and the totalitarian theocracy that follows. And yet the latter is arguably more interesting, looking back to Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and prefiguring Atwood and The Handmid's Tale.

Woohoo told me (I think) that Christopher thought this his best book. But gritty near-future realism dates worse than other sci-fi subgenres, and the book doesn't really speak to me today. For release. (No specific location in mind - Pallister, where the book is set, doesn't exist, unfortunately.)

Tape Hill Lodge seems to be an unofficial community room among the derelict buildings of Tape Hill Farm. Since we were passing, I intended to release a book inside. Unfortunately it was locked, probably because of Coronavirus, but I tucked this book into the eaves just to the right of the door.