Knopf
Review by Jinny Webber
In the lead article in the New York Times morning newsletter of September 25, 2024, Steve Lohr, who covers technology and the economy for the Times, discusses how the CrowdStrike disaster that “should have been a routine software update by a security company crashed millions of computers around the world,” crippling airlines, hospitals, 911 dispatches, businesses, and much more. Lohr’s essay describes protective measures developed during the pandemic and afterwards, but the chaos in 2024 happened nonetheless.
“New advances make our lives easier, but there are trade-offs. They can vanish quickly — in an outage, a hack or a pandemic. And as the economy has become more dependent on a smaller number of technology companies, we’ve become more susceptible to hiccups that affect them. . . .We’re ‘highly digitized, highly interdependent, highly connected, and highly vulnerable,’ said Jen Easterly, who leads the Homeland Security Department’s agency focused on digital infrastructure.’”
Four years before the CrowdStrike chaos, Robert Harris published the post-apocalyptic novel The Second Sleep, which explores how a universal technological crash could end civilization as we know it. Slight spoiler: we don’t grasp that’s what happened when the novel begins. Set in 1468, it feels like medieval thatched-cottage England, so our realization that it both is and isn’t develops gradually.We see Dark Age Christianity at its strictest. The spoken language must be that of the King James Bible, using ‘ye’ and ‘thou’ and such. Hmmm. That bible was published in 1611.
As Stephen King says in his cover blurb, this novel is compulsive reading. Puzzle after puzzle is unraveled—or are they? The story is as tense as any thriller.
The novel’s title connects to the epigraph by A. Roger Ekirch in At Days’ Close, A History of Nighttime: “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep . . . The initial interval of slumber was usually referred to as ‘first sleep . . .’ The succeeding interval was called ‘second’ or ‘morning’ sleep . . . Both phases lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest.’ A little-known fact, it applies more than literally to this novel.
The story opens with a solitary traveler riding to the village of Addicott St. George one darkening April day in 1468. This young priest, Christopher Fairfax, has been sent by Bishop Pole to preside at the funeral of the village priest. It’s Christopher’s first venture outside the bishopric, and a mysterious one. Even finding the place is a challenge.
Father Lacy died in a fall near a place villagers call The Devil’s Chair. His death doesn’t appear to be murder, for the ground there is treacherous, and his injuries are consistent with falling down the steep ravine where he was found. Still, why was he out there? Only after Christopher conducts the funeral does he learn much about the dead priest. One thing and another detain him, and he ends up staying in Father Lacy’s room—where, incidentally, he learns that after the first sleep villagers wander around rather than remaining indoors as he has always done.
An orphan now twenty-four years old, Christopher has led a sheltered life. He was raised by monks, attended seminary, and became a priest working for Bishop Pole, never serving in a parish church. Ancient stone churches abound in England: 37,000 according to this story, dating long before the catastrophe. Those living then must have been wicked to be so stricken down, and it’s a crime to investigate any remnants of ‘antique’ society.
Yet our world is this lost society, our ignorance of potential consequences that Harris depicts, the surviving detritus made by us. Therein lies the disquieting power of The Second Sleep.
Until he arrived in Addicott St. George, Christopher lived as an unquestioning Christian, but he is young and curious. In Father Lacy’s study, he finds a shelf of heretical books and collection of forbidden antiquities made of glass and plastic. Copies of his sermons indicate the Book of Revelation was his constant theme.
Christopher is also intrigued by Lady Sarah Durston, a young widow living outside the village. Ruins of grand houses could still be visited in the countryside as proof of the transience of human glory, but Sarah actually lives on the property. The building intended as a stable has become her watertight domain, its faded glory provided by decorations from the great house. Living alone except for a single maid is only one sign of her stubborn independence. She doesn’t want to marry her suitor Captain Hancock, headstrong and powerful.
Late in the novel Christopher asks Hancock about the catastrophe and how anyone survived to resume these simple lives. Stone churches are key, and a belief in Armageddon. Remnants of earlier times would threaten established knowledge developed after the catastrophe. And yet . . . inquiring minds want to know. Christopher, Sarah, Captain Hancock, the aged antiquarian Dr. Shadwell: they must risk learning what truth they can, regardless of cost. Thus the book becomes a reflection on truth and faith and the dangers that could threaten our very existence, living just one year before this fictional disaster. It is and intense and terrifying novel.
Robert Harris has long been honored as an inventive storyteller of historical tales from unique angles. Other favorites are Pompeii, his Cicero trilogy, Act of Oblivion, and his most recent novel Precipice, set as WW I is beginning. The Second Sleep is an outlier, but who writes the same book twice?
