After London or, Wild England
Richard Jeffries
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Classics, Post-Apocalypse
**+
Description
Centuries ago, the ancients ruled the Earth by land, sea, and sky. Their buildings reached to the clouds. Their science cured disease. Countless miracles
and wonders were the stuff of everyday life. Then, at the very apex of their civilization, came the fall. Few relics survive of those times, and fewer
records.
In the years since, the wilderness that they had tamed rose up to reclaim the lands. People slowly began rebuilding their lives, falling back into the brutal
ways of constant warfare and slavery, with only those of high birth permitted to learn the art of reading. In this world, true thinkers and explorers are few
and far between, their talents ridiculed by a populace that considers brute force or clever alliance the only worthwhile measures of a man.
Felix Aquila, son of an eclipsed Baron, knows he's different. He never took much interest in the martial arts, like his brother, nor does he care for the games
of courtly intrigues that elevate his peers in the eyes of the Prince. His lack of prospects makes his love of Aurora, daughter of a nearby noble, all the more
hopeless; she may profess her love of him, but her father's political ambitions will never condone a marriage to a young man of so little influence. But Felix's
studies of the ancients have given him a keen and curious mind. To seek his fortune and make his mark, he sets forth to explore the vast, uncharted Lake that
covers much of southern England since the fall of the ancients.
Review
I had high hopes for this book. The first third or so, explaining the world that arose from the ashes of our fallen civilization, drug now and then, but was
overall fascinating, a speculation (if a somewhat dated one) of what animals might survive, what cultures might arise, and how the very landscape would react to
the devastation of its primary distorter, modern humans. It would've made for a great basis for an RPG, actually, setting up the geographical and political
landscape a player would have to navigate. Then the story abruptly shifts from an overview to a narrative... one that repeats much of what the narrative already
told the reader, only filtered through a dull omniscient point of view. The earlier part, therefore, becomes a spoiler or the latter, as the chronicles were written
well after Felix's adventures on the Lake. Felix himself makes an uninteresting main character. Moody and judgmental and repeatedly oblivious to obvious problems,
he mopes and trudges dully through an adventure that theoretically became nearly legendary in his world. Aurora, like many females in elder-day books (and a
depressing number of modern ones), is nothing but a stained glass image of a woman, a lovely work of art to gaze upon, full of holy light, but ultimately thin and
transparent and hardly even human in her seeming perfection. More than once, the story stops dead in its tracks for pages on end while the narrative natters on about
this irrelevant detail or that unrelated point of interest. And then it ends, leaving both Felix and the reader in the middle of nowhere.
I tried to make allowances for the age of the book (this being a public domain work, originally published in 1885.) Given its age, it read remarkably like a more
modern work; I didn't have to struggle as much as I have with some classics. It also had some interesting speculations, at least at first, about a post-apocalyptic
world. But those speculations were wasted twice over, in a book that not only told its story twice, but actively sabotaged itself.