“The essence of cosy catastrophe,” wrote the science fiction author Brian W Aldiss, “is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.” He was thinking, perhaps, of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the protagonists, despite occupying a London where blinded citizens are hunted by lumbering carnivorous plants, are quietly pleased that the end of civilisation has also terminated the stultifying conventions of 1950s marriage.
Readers in the 1970s, when Aldiss was writing Billion Year Spree, his history of science fiction, might have thought of Survivors, Terry Nation’s TV series that killed most of the British population with plague — but which, by its second series, was as much a paean to self-sufficiency as The Good Life. Readers in the 2020s may think of other stories: the post-apocalyptic Fox sitcom The Last Man on Earth, or Raised by Wolves — Ridley Scott’s new TV series about an android couple bringing up humanity’s last survivors. There’s even, I think, an echo of Aldiss’s idea in the discussions we’re having — on Zoom calls between friends and at the World Economic Forum — about whether a better world might emerge after the Covid-19 crisis has passed.
The name of Margot Bennett does not appear in Billion Year Spree. It doesn’t appear in many places. She is a scandalously forgotten writer. Even her murder mysteries, for which she received a Golden Dagger Award, have fallen out of print. Only the second-hand section will now yield her blue-spined Pelican, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, or The Furious Masters — a creepy story about an alien spaceship and its influence on an English village. You’ll have to search hard, too, for the book I think is her masterpiece, a novel of 1954 set in a post-catastrophic England that is anything but cosy: The Long Way Back. It is a scaldingly witty corrective to two ills that seem as present today as they did in the 1950s: British self-importance and British self-pity.
In Bennett’s future, mainland Europe has sunk beneath the waves. The British Isles remain, but the Savoy is gone, there are no cars to be requisitioned and the tins of pineapple chunks and luncheon meat ran out long ago. The plants have turned carnivorous. (Thankfully they can’t move.) Monstrous canine mutants, the sabre-toothed descendants of household pets, stalk the forests. Britons live in caves and on potatoes. They worship a god that is a personification of fear. “We fear,” goes their litany, spoken by a four-foot tall tribesman named Brown. “We fear illness, death, fire, dogs, fever, madness, desolation.”
This is not a story about the conquest of that fear. The Britons we encounter are not the protagonists of the story. We don’t see this country through their eyes. Bennett’s heroes are members of a survey team despatched from the continental superpower of Africa. Grame, a restless technician, and Valya, a tough soldier, have come to “investigate primitive Britain,” an obscure and hazardous backwater whose inhabitants they view with horror, pity and contempt. “Savages,” breathes Valya, when she encounters her first tribal Englishmen. “And speaking in a dialect of our own language. It’s a miracle.”
The Long Way Back reverses the conventions of imperial literature that we associate with Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Its African explorers speculate about mining British coal and shipping it back home. They worry about the health of the natives. (“If only we could educate the mothers to feed their children properly,” Valya declares, wondering if calcium supplements would help thicken their fragile skulls.)
For Bennett’s original readers — still two years away from the Suez Crisis that triggered Britain’s period of decolonisation – such humour must have seemed astonishing. In the age of Brexit and BLM, it plays differently — demonstrating that, over six decades later, the tensions and contradictions within Britain’s post-imperial identity have yet to be resolved; that the process of decolonisation remains incomplete.
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