I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try. It was fun. The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator.
It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian. You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it.”
BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse. Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is.
This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book. These future people are so mystified by our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:
opened like a book. A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet.
It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way.
That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere. There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.