books

Post-war British science fiction sometimes asks, very politely, what it would take to crack the national character. John Wyndham's triffids and his cosy catastrophes mostly answered: not very much, but we'll cope. John Christopher's 1956 novel offers a far more uncomfortable reply. The Death of Grass starts from a premise of brutal elegance - a virus, the Chung-Li, that kills grasses, beginning with the rice of China and mutating into the wheat, barley and rye that sustain Europe - and follows the consequences with a coldness that still has the power to startle.

The story is built on a journey. John Custance, a London architect, learns from a Whitehall contact that the British government is preparing to nuke its own cities to manage the coming famine. He gathers his family, his more volatile friend Roger, a gun-shop owner he half-conscripts, and a small entourage, and they head north towards his brother's smallholding in a defensible Westmorland valley. What follows is roughly two hundred pages of accelerating moral subtraction. Roadblocks. Negotiations. Shootings. By the end, the mild-mannered architect has become the absolute, unsentimental leader of a small armed band, and the gap between him and the warlord he might have fled has effectively closed.

The book's most quoted line - that wide loyalties are civilised luxuries, and loyalties from now on will be narrower and fiercer - functions as both thesis and warning. Christopher is interested less in spectacle than in the speed at which a comfortable man will agree to terrible things once the alternative is his daughter starving. The pacing is relentless, the prose stripped to the point of austerity, and the book's brevity is a feature rather than a limitation. It can comfortably be finished in a single sitting, and there is a case for reading it that way, because the cumulative pressure is part of the design.

It is also genuinely prescient. Robert Macfarlane's introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition rightly flags the ecological intelligence at work here. Christopher is one of the earliest English novelists to imagine collapse arriving not by bomb but by biology, and the book reads now as a quiet rebuke to the standard mid-century assumption that civilisation would be ended by something sudden and male, rather than by the slow failure of soil. It is also one of the few apocalypses of its era willing to suggest that the British are no more equipped to weather catastrophe than anyone else, a sly subversion of the genre's habitual exceptionalism. The opening chapters lean hard into a smug Western certainty that what is happening in Asia could never happen here, and one of the novel's quieter pleasures is watching that certainty curdle.

Those virtues sit alongside real difficulties, and there is no honest way to recommend the book without naming them. The transformation of John Custance from suburban professional to remorseless killer happens at a pace that strains belief. Within roughly a day he is shooting unarmed people with the calm of a man pricing kitchen units, and the novel spends almost no energy on the psychological cost. The dialogue can be stilted in the way of much fifties popular fiction. The female characters are barely characters; they are conditions to be managed, protected, occasionally consulted, frequently silenced. A sexual assault midway through the journey is handled with a queasy briskness, and the conversational shrug it receives afterwards from the male leads is harder to read now than almost any of the killings. There is, too, a strand of 1950s racial assumption in the early framing of Asia, which Christopher partially undermines through irony but does not entirely escape.

What rescues the book from these limitations, and it is rescued, just, is that the bleakness is not decorative. Christopher is not entertaining himself with brutality; he is making an argument about how thin everyday civility actually is, and the argument is sharpened rather than blunted by the discomfort it generates. Compared with the gentler British apocalypses around it, this one is willing to look at what survival actually costs, and to refuse the consolations of late redemption. There is no scene where a good man recovers his goodness. There is only the valley, and what has to be done to reach it.

The Death of Grass is not the masterpiece its strongest advocates claim, and it is not the unreadable artefact its harshest detractors describe. It is a tight, frequently unpleasant, frequently brilliant short novel whose flaws are inseparable from its period and whose insights have outlasted it. Worth reading, and worth arguing with.