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.