During the covid pandemic I've seen people say they never knew that the end of the world was going to be so dull. Given the drama that this book is about, it is really dull.

This is the revised version of 2011. Originally written in the 1970s, Priest's story tells of a mass fleeing from Africa (just a great big generic mass of "Africa"), with hundreds of thousands of refugees turning up. In the UK, this causes a lot of social problems, which lead to civil war, "Afrims" vs the right-wing government vs left-wing opposition. Brits are chased out of their homes and turned into refugees in their own country. Priest stresses that this isn't meant to be a political book but rather a look at the individual person and how all of this uproar affects him. But he's created such an unlikeable and apathetic, emotionless main character that I can't say I really felt anything. And that tragedy at the end really loses any punch it could have had because of it. The story jumps about to different points in the life of Alan Whitman, including before the entire Afrim disaster. So it can get a bit confusing where you are in the timeline, although you do pick it up eventually. And I suppose as he's narrating this after the fact, and he's now a shell of himself, he's telling it in this factual, emotionless way. But... yeah, it really brings nothing to the table for the reader. There's also a lot about his sex life, just as casual and apathetic at the rest of the story, which gets very tiresome very quick.

I suppose there's a lot of worthy points in here about racism, the legacy of colonialism and empire building, the need for humanity and communication, how easy it is to ignore wars and the plights of people as long as you're comfortable (felt a bit unbelieveable that the south of England was a war zone except the strip along the coast that was behaving as though nothing had happened.) - which seems particularly poignant just now as everything's kicking off in the Ukraine. And of course, how it's not so much fun when you get to experience being a refugee, losing everything, being on the run, going to refugee camps and so on.

Priest is a funny one for me, either his books are brilliant or rather meh. He doesn't seem to do somewhere in between.

Read this book in one day. Liked it. It was an easy read. And interesting too.

Fugue For A Darkening Island presents a tale of gradual social collapse that should be familiar to anyone who's ever read Wyndham or Christopher; typically the only variable in these stories is what causes the collapse. In this case it's a nuclear war in Africa sending millions of refugees flooding onto British shores.

And this is the disturbing part. For much of the book, I thought it was severely racist: a story of thuggish blacks invading the white British homeland and causing death, anarchy and destruction. It was written more than thirty-five years ago, before the UK became the multi-cultural melting pot it is today, when the idea may have reflected the concerns of many British citizens (or, alternatively, the concerns of many citizens in modern-day Australia). As the book progressed, it seemed somewhat less racist - the British government in the story is extremely right-wing, fascist and engaged in overt genocide, and the narrator is portrayed as a hapless civilian refugee caught up between the two forces, light and dark. He sums it up in the last few pages:

In my unwitting role as a refugee I had of neccesity played a neutral role. But it seemed to me it would be impossible for this to continue in the future. I could not stay uncommitted forever.

In what I had seen and heard of the activities of the Secessionist forces, it had always appeared to me that they had adopted a more humanitarian attitude to the situation. It was not morally right to deny the African immigrants an identity or a voice. The war must be resolved one way or another in time, and it was now inevitable that the Africans would stay in Britain permanently.

On the other hand, the extreme actions of the Nationalist side, which stemmed initially from the conservative and repressive policies of Tregarth's government (an administration I had distrusted and disliked) appealed to me on an instinctive level. It had been the Africans who had indirectly deprived me of everything I once owned. Ultimately, I knew the question depended on finding Isobel. If she and Sally had not been harmed my instincts would be quieted...

Priest appears to be arguing here that while we will always harbour a natural instinct to distrust the Other, defend our family and fight off outsiders, we should rise above that with our intelligence and civilisation, and hold to the better part of human nature. This is a wise argument, which is also the defining theme of Cloud Atlas, one of my favourite books of all time.

Yet there are certain elements of Fugue For A Darkening Island that still seem racist - white Secessionist forces always treat the protagonist more humanely than black militants, there's an unrealistic shallowness to the portrayal of African refugees (a fairly unified force that speaks Swahili across the board), and there's the squirming feeling I get simply from reading this scenario put into words. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis - the population of the Third World greatly outnumbers that of the First, and Europe and Africa are geographically close... though you'd think continental Europe would cop the brunt of it, rather than Britain. I would be remiss if I didn't point out the handful of Muslim riots in France, which right-wingers interpret as evidence that immigration has turned Paris into a corpse-strewn wasteland identical to Mogadishu, and that some kind of apartheid should naturally be introduced.

I digress. I don't want to accuse Priest of being racist. Science fiction is all about exploring speculative scenarios, especially with a political bent to them, and while significant parts of the book made me uneasy I'm not going to cast judgement on his decision to write it.

But, having barely cleared the political correctness board, Priest must now pass the literary merit test. And he fails. Fugue For A Darkening Island, allegations of racism aside, is simply not a very good book. The bulk of it consists of the protagonist scavenging, conflicting with other parties of survivors, picking up what bits of news that he can and wandering through refugee camps and ruined towns looking for his family. It's not a badly realised world, but neither is it an original or compelling one. This isn't helped by Priest's decision to tell the story in four different timeframes at once, rapidly switching between them, mixing up pointless adolescent sexual misadventures and taking us through the protagonist's marriage problems. Finally, the cold and detached tone that seemed perfectly natural in Inverted World does him a great disservice here, portraying the narrator as an emotionless bastard with a tediously analytical mind. Fugue For A Darkening Island is a fairly unremarkable book, which is why I was so puzzled at the decision to bundle it with Inverted World, an excellent science fiction classic.

Tough to get into at first, especially because of the way the timelines are threaded, but a compelling story once you get used to that. Prescient.

Can't help but laugh at the one-star reviews here by the scandalized who've only ever been presented with things they agree with.

Can't say I was a fan!

Britain is in the grip of a right wing government whose harsh economic policies are causing untold hardship for the population. Meanwhile, immigrants, fleeing war, are flooding into the country, resulting in social instability and a dramatic rise in racist sentiment. Does that sound familiar? Does it sound like 2016? Yup, but Christopher Priest’s FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND (his second published novel) was written in 1973, making it a remarkably prescient work of fiction. Here, the immigrants are Africans, and their unstoppable influx results in a three-sided civil war. There is racism, of course, and it’s difficult to digest (mostly due to outdated terminology), but actually no more unpalatable than the assumptions and ill-concealed prejudices on display in contemporary newspapers, and here it’s at least justified by the story. I was fascinated by the novel’s relevance and plausibility, and by the fact that Priest has, since this edition, heavily revised it. I’d be interested in reading the newer version, just to see what he thought needed changing (aside from the obvious politically incorrect language). Overall, this is a traumatic study of a disintegrating country and the crumbling psyche of the lead character. Brilliant and disturbing.

Some cool ideas and world building hidden in a strangely boring tale with an unlikeable protagonist.

The sort of book that deserves an unfaithful film or to adaption.