The Death of Grass
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
The Death of Grass
John Christopher (Sam Youd) was born in Lancashire, England, in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm. When he was ten, he moved south to Hampshire. He attended Peter Symonds’ School, Winchester, where his academic record was undistinguished. After leaving school at sixteen, he worked as a local government clerk until he was called up for Army service in early 1942. He spent the following four and a half years with the Royal Corps of Signals, in Gibraltar, North Africa, Italy and Austria. His military record matched his academic: he left the Army as he had joined it, as a Signalman. In 1947, on the basis of an unfinished novel, he was given an Atlantic Award, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave him a year to concentrate on writing. As well as general novels, in the next few years he also wrote other kinds of fiction under different names: detective thrillers, light comedies, novels based on cricket – and speculative fiction, deriving from an earlier devotion to science-fiction, for which he used the John Christopher pen-name. The Death of Grass was first published in 1956 and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1957 under its American title, No Blade of Grass; subsequently it was made into a film directed by Cornel Wilde. After several adult Christophers, including A Wrinkle in the Skin and The World in Winter, he turned to the Young Adult field and wrote the Tripods trilogy. Subsequent titles included The Guardians, The Lotus Caves, Dom and Va, Empty World, the Sword trilogy (his personal favourites) and the Fireball trilogy. Following a BBC television series in 1984 based on the Tripods books, he wrote a prequel, When the Tripods Came. He has had several literary awards: in 1957 The Death of Grass was runner-up for the International Fantasy Award (which that year went to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings); the books in the Tripods trilogy were runners-up for the Guardian Award, which was won in 1971 by The Guardians, also winner of a Christopher Medal and Germany’s Jugendbuchpreis.
He is a widower, with a son and four daughters and five grandchildren, and now lives in Rye, East Sussex.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), which won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Wild Places (2007), which won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the New York Times.
JOHN CHRISTOPHER
The Death of Grass
with an Introduction by
Robert Macfarlane
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published by Michael Joseph 1956
Published in Penguin Books 1958
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © John Christopher, 1956
Introduction copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and the introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-19201-7
INTRODUCTION
We live in an age of epidemics. Foot and Mouth, Blue Tongue, Avian Flu, SARS, infection routes, restriction zones, surveillance areas, mass inoculations – we have become fluent in the language of contagion. Scenes from outbreaks fill our news packages: exclusion tape fluttering in the breeze, distant figures in white bio-hazard suits, the crackle of respirators, the taking of ‘preventative measures’ (scurrying commuters wearing face masks; six million chickens slaughtered in China; blazing pyres of bolt-gunned and stiff-legged cattle in Cumbria).
The most charismatic viruses are those that affect birds, animals and humans. But the most dangerous are those that affect crop plants. In 1999, reports emerged from Africa of a fungus named Ug99 – a form of black stem rust that kills wheat by preventing nutrient uptake, and that can wipe out entire harvests. The first strains of Ug99 were detected in Uganda. By 2001 it had spread to Kenya, by 2003 to Ethiopia, and by 2007 – its spores dispersed by Cyclone Gonu – to Yemen and into Pakistan. ‘Poorer populations in vulnerable countries could starve if the diseases hits yields hard enough,’ the BBC reported after Gonu, with ‘most wheat grown in Africa’ being vulnerable to Ug99. There is presently no reason to think that the spread of Ug99 is containable. Given the correct wind events, it could within a few years have infiltrated the Asian wheat-bowl of Pakistan and India. Together, these two countries account for 20 per cent of global wheat production; more than one billion people depend upon the wheat harvest for food and livelihood. The US Agricultural Research Service describes Ug99 as posing ‘an unprecedented international threat to wheat and barley’.
Unprecedented in life, but not in fiction. For in 1956 a brilliant counter-factual novel was published that predicted – with eerie accuracy – the menace of Ug99. It was called The Death of Grass, its author was John Christopher (a pseudonym for Sam Youd), and it quickly became a bestseller. Its jacket blurb described it as a vision ‘of the relentless transformation of England when the balance of nature is upset’, but the catastrophe it imagined was global in reach. At the novel’s opening, a highly contagious rice virus – nicknamed the Chung-Li virus – has emerged and blighted ‘the Far East’. An estimated 200 million people have died or are dying in China from famine and social unrest, following the near-total failure of the rice harvest. From China, Chung-Li spreads westwards and southwards, mutating fast enough to outpace attempts to control it. By the time of its fifth mutation, it afflicts any member of the Gramineae family: that is to say, all 10,000 species of grass, including the major crop plants – wheat, barley, oats and rye. It reaches Britain, and even leaps the Atlantic to America. Within a few years of the virus’s first appearance, a global famine has ensued. Supply chains have collapsed worldwide. Food export has ceased. Livestock are dying for want of fodder, bird and fish populations have crashed, and fields and downs lie bald and brown. So begins the main part of the novel, which describes the attempts of an English family to survive the chaos brought by Chung-Li.
The novel, like so many narratives of eco-apocalypse, is a vision of nature’s revenge for its sustained mistreatment – a return of the repressed. ‘For years now, we’ve treated the land as though it were a piggy-bank, to be raided’, explains one of the main characters, David, a farmer, ‘and the land, after all, is life itself.’ In the opening chapters, Chr
istopher sketches an environmental context for the emergence of Chung-Li: years of over-production, a turn to mono-culture, and the excessive use of pesticides to maximise yield following the privations of the War. ‘There’s no sense in doing anything but wheat and potatoes these days’, grumbles David early on. ‘That’s what the Government wants, so that’s what I give ’em’. The novel was eventually filmed in 1970 – the film, like the US edition, was rechristened No Blade Of Grass, allegedly because it was thought that The Death of Grass ‘sounded like something from a gardening catalogue’ – in an adaptation so arrestingly bad that Christopher himself has never been able to watch more than a few minutes of it. The opening sequence of the film is a montage of throbbing exhaust pipes, belching chimneys, crop-sprayers swooping low over maize fields, and dead fish wallowing in the shallows of poisoned rivers. ‘Then one day,’ the voiceover pompously intones, ‘the polluted earth could take no more…’ Christopher’s novel, unlike its adaptation, is neither pompous nor strident; but it does lay the blame for Chung-Li at humanity’s door.
One way to understand The Death of Grass is as belonging to a mid-century sci-fi tradition of what might be called ‘floral apocalypse’, which began in 1947 when an American writer, Ward Moore, published Greener Than You Think. At the start of Moore’s novel, an unscrupulous salesman sprays a Los Angeles lawn with an untested Miracle-Gro-like compound. Whoosh! The lawn sprouts, uncontrollably, until its grass is ten feet high – coarse, thick and impenetrable. Then the grass spreads, engulfing LA and then California, ‘smothering all other life’. Moore was, of course, tilting satirically at white-picket-fence America and its suburban obsession with neatness. But his novel is also clearly anxious at the uncontrolled use of chemicals: he was writing at a time when pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers were being employed in rising quantities in American agriculture (a trend that would be denounced by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), the book that launched the modern environmental movement).
Similar concerns at human interventions in the natural order motivate John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids (1951), in which genetic engineering by Russian scientists results in a species of gigantic, mobile and vengeful plants, equipped with toxic whiplash tongues. The Death of Grass came six years later; five years after that, Thomas Disch – one of the new sci-fi writers published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine – made his mark with The Genocides, in which the Earth is overrun by a species of alien flora known only as ‘The Plants’. The Plants grow up to six hundred feet in height and drain almost all surface water from the earth; a surviving group of humans feud and forage for sustenance ‘like worms, crawling through an apple’.
The Death of Grass has clear family resemblances to these novels, but Christopher himself has objected to the labelling of his work as ‘science fiction’; and in particular to the idea that The Death of Grass was a response to the so-called ‘cosy catastrophe’ scenario of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (in which the upper lips of all Englishmen remain resolutely stiff, decency finally prevails, and the threatened hero and heroine retire to a rather pleasant rural retreat where they can set about rebuilding civilisation…). When Youd began writing seriously, after the Second World War, it was mainstream fiction, not science fiction, that he wanted to produce – and for which he was given an Atlantic Award in Literature by the Rockefeller Foundation. This resulted in a first novel, The Winter Swan (1949), which was an account of a woman’s life written in reverse order, from death to childhood. Between 1949 and 1963, he published ten mainstream novels as Samuel Youd. In the early 1950s he was also writing short stories for – chiefly – American science-fiction magazines, using the pen-name John Christopher. In 1954 a collection of these was published under the title The 22nd Century; Christopher was subsequently asked by the publisher Michael Joseph to contribute to a new series of novels under the general heading of ‘Novels of Tomorrow’. His first contribution to this series was an extension of his short-story collection, The Year of the Comet. The second was rejected, and he wrote The Death of Grass as a replacement. This novel about outbreak was to be his breakout book. A thought experiment in future-shock survivalism, it caught the imagination of a country for whom the threat of German invasion was not long distant.
To my mind, the novel with which The Death of Grass bears most comparison is not a sci-fi at all, but William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Like Christopher, Golding was deeply suspicious of British exceptionalism; the sentimental sense, lingering from the imperial nineteenth century, that the British are intuitively morally superior to other cultures and nations. Golding famously opposed British complacency following the Second World War, remarking in an interview that Lord of the Flies ‘was simply what it seemed sensible for me to write after the war, when everyone was thanking God they weren’t Nazis. I’d seen enough to realize that every single one of us could be Nazis.’ His novel, in which a tribe of English schoolboys run murderously feral on a desert island, showed how close to the surface darkness lurks in any given group.
The hollowness of the quality of ‘Englishness’, the perishability of conventional ethics, the immanence of tribalism as a social structure – exactly the same themes animate Christopher’s novel. The book centres on John Custance, an engineer living with his family in London. The early pages evoke Custance’s life in a Batsford England of bosomy downlands, sleepy seaside towns and well-fed burghers, of letter-boxes, warm beer, cricket on the green, tea on the lawn, and fair play. This is a post-rationing, pre-viral England: a lazy, decent and chlorophyll-rich idyll. Christopher ticks off the clichés of Englishness with relish, in anticipation of their destruction. For as the Chung-Li virus grips the country, and food supplies dwindle, normal life begins to disintegrate. Eventually, the government declares a form of martial law. Rumours circulate that small nuclear bombs are to be dropped onto the principal English cities, in order to decrease the population sufficiently that at least some will survive.
John takes a snap decision to lead his family out of London and up to Cumbria, where he knows that his brother David has a farm in a defensible Westmorland valley, whose fields David has prudently planted with virus-resistant potatoes. The remainder of the novel describes the journey north-west – by car and then on foot – of the Custance family and various companions, up through the bald and cankered landscape of southern England, the Midlands and Yorkshire. Gangs and raiding parties prowl the landscape; villages and towns have turned themselves into fortified strongholds. Basic needs – food, shelter – become increasingly difficult to fulfill. Yet on they push – to Custance’s last stand at the valley, the consequences of which I won’t reveal here.
The valley is one of the novel’s finest inventions: a natural bunker, a fall-back zone. Its floor is fertile, its three sides are steeply cragged, and it narrows to a tight mouth at its one exit. Through it runs the River Lepe, a deep, cold and quick torrent, which supplies the valley with fresh water and fish.
Lepe is only a slip away from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that runs through the realm of Hades in Greek mythology: Virgil describes how the shades of the dead have to drink from Lethe, in order to forget their past lives on earth.
And this suppression of memory – moral memory – is Christopher’s chief subject. ‘We must forget them’, says one character of the starving Chinese millions early on: this before it is clear that England, too, will fall to the virus. And when it does, the English forget themselves. John Custance begins the novel as a thoroughly decent chap, a middle-class civil servant and father of two. By its end he has murdered and executed a number of people, including – in a genuinely disturbing scene – an innocent woman whom he shoots in the face with a 12-bore. He leaves London a liberal humanist, and arrives in Cumbria a proto-Darwinist, interested only in those actions that will most efficiently permit the survival of himself and his group. ‘It’s not only the weakest but the least efficient as well who are going to go to the wall’, notes Pirrie, the grou
p’s most talented gunman, who also becomes John’s tutor in pragmatic atrocity (Pirrie murders his wife, then takes a young girl as a sex-slave, having helped to kill her parents).
What Pirrie sneeringly calls ‘the veneer of civilization’ is not peeled away in this novel; civilization itself is smashed to kindling. ‘They had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be traced back nearly four thousand years’, the narrative voice booms, B-movie style, ‘in a day it had been swept from under them… The break-up had come, irrevocably’. Rape, murder and theft abound. About the only crime that doesn’t occur on the journey is cannibalism (cf the survivalist mantra: ‘In any survival situation, you should try to keep your friends alive as long as possible. They stay fresh longer that way.’) Not even the family unit endures. For as the going becomes more hazardous, Custance’s loyalties transfer from his wife and children to ‘the group’ (‘the law of the group – for its own protection – must prevail’). Eventually, a few miles short of the valley, John is formally elected as the leader of his caravan of raiders, shooters and hangers-on: the tribal chief. The people he eventually shepherds to temporary safety in the valley are the forerunners of the biker gangs in the Mad Max cycle and Dawn of the Dead, or the gangs who roam Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007), another dystopian vision of a journey through a blasted landscape. Like McCarthy’s novel The Death of Grass is distinguished by the implacability of its narrative tone, and the alarming speed at which morality is shown to decompose under emergency conditions.
One way to measure the achievement of a novel of this kind is to consider how true its vision becomes, given time. It’s by this metric that J. G. Ballard’s reputation prospers: the Seer of Shepperton has correctly predicted the nomination of Ronald Reagan for president, twenty-four-hour shopping, reality television, ‘happy slapping’, and the decline of high-rise living, among dozens of other things. He possesses an alarming ability for futurology, somehow sensing the psychopathologies of a culture long before they begin to earth themselves in behaviour.