Book Review: 'The Second Sleep' by Robert Harris
'The Second Sleep' first was published in the UK in 2019 by Hutchinson. This trade paperback edition (432 pp.) was issued by Arrow Books in July, 2020.
I usually don't post reviews of sci-fi or fantasy novels published after the early 1990s, as there are quite a few websites and blogs that cover such novels and I prefer to focus this blog on works published during the interval from the middle Sixties to the Early Nineties.
However, I was motivated to post a review of 'The Second Sleep' because it uses the theme of a technologically deracinated England struggling to emerge into a new era of enlightenment, a theme used to good advantage in some novels from the Seventies and Eighties. I thought it interesting to see how author Harris (who has had considerable success with writing mystery novels set in ancient Rome) would handle the theme.
The eponymous 'second sleep' refers to the practice, by people living in the eras before artificial lighting, of briefly walking during the middle of the night, before returning once more to slumber.
‘The Second Sleep’ takes place in the UK, some 1,500 years after a vaguely described cataclysm that occurred in the 2020s propelled the country to a quasi-medieval level of civilization. Life is nasty, brutal, and short, and the church the sole arbiter of learning. The upper echelons of the clergy are intent on prohibiting any revivals of ancient technologies, as these are seen as challenges to the supremacy of the church. The violators of church edicts are eligible for summary prosecution, and execution, for ‘heresy.’
As the novel opens a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is traveling to the village of Addicott, in Wessex, there to see to the funeral of the village parson, one Father Thomas Lacy. Fairfax learns that Lacy tread dangerously close to heresy, possessing forbidden books about the ancients, and prone to digging for artifacts in the middens scattered around Wessex.
While Fairfax is callow, he also is curious, and his inquiries into the manner of father Lacy’s passing, and the information presented in the deceased man’s collections of texts and artifacts, lead him into attitudes and beliefs that will contradict all he has been taught by the church. Fairfax makes a fateful decision to extend his stay in Addicott, and in so doing, joins a clandestine project to learn more about the ancients. A project that could earn all its participants the scaffold……
As I mentioned earlier, ‘The Second Sleep’ certainly is not the first novel to take as its topic a post-apocalyptic Britain, where the awareness of the destroyed past keeps percolating up into the consciousness of the present-day population. Edmund Cooper visited this trope in his excellent novel ‘The Cloud Walker’ (1973), Richard Cowper with his 'Road to Corlay' trilogy (1978), and Keith Roberts in his novel ‘Kiteworld’ (1985). Like those novels, ‘The Second Sleep’ focuses on the conflict between humanism and religion, and between orthodoxy and innovation.
However, while ‘The Second Sleep’ is a well-written novel, with smoothly flowing prose, it lacks the imaginative power of the novels from Cooper, Corlay, and Roberts. The plot of ‘Second Sleep’ takes its time unfolding, and is subordinate to characterization, setting, and atmosphere. And the denouement has a desultory quality.
While I certainly wasn’t expecting Fairfax to discover a Vault, access its armory, grab some Power Armor and a Gatling Laser, and lay waste to Wessex, I was anticipating something more impactful than what occupies the last 15 pages of ‘The Second Sleep.’
If you have the patience for a small-scale novel that unfolds at a very slow pace towards a rather underwhelming ending, then you might like ‘The Second Sleep.’ But if you want something a little livelier, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
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