2015 read #39: After London by Richard Jefferies.

After London, or Wild England by Richard Jefferies
312 pages
Published 1885
Read from August 4 to August 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike." That ranks up there among the very best opening "hooks" in Victorian speculative fiction -- perhaps not quite equal to The War of the Worlds, but without a doubt powerful and intriguing. The moment I read it I knew I wanted to know everything that followed.

Unforunately, H.G. Wells was ahead of his time in terms of structuring scientific romances and integrating story with imaginative ideas. Jefferies spends his first five chapters laying out the geography and anthropology of his changed England, guided perhaps by the model of Classical historians. His hero is introduced in a sound sleep while our omniscient future-historian narrator describes all the furnishings in his room. Jefferies squanders the novelty of his setting on a sort of medieval romance, most reminiscent to me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, though Jefferies uses his setup to emphasise the squalor and tyranny of feudal society. Despite adherence to the race theory of his time, Jefferies advances a clearly anti-aristocratic message, hinting at how little separates the disparities of class and wealth in Victorian times from the barbarous, autocratic warlordism and debt slavery of his post-collapse England.

This message doesn't gel particularly well with Jefferies' nascent environmentalism, which contrasts the woodsy idyll of the early scene-setting chapters with the poisonous effluvia of decaying London. Perhaps the thematic link between "nature good, city bad" and "humans in the depopulated countryside will revert to barbarism and feudal slavery" is simple misanthropy. Jefferies lavishes his depopulated England with glowing descriptions of fish and fowl and verdant forests; the human marauders intruding upon these Edenic scenes bring their own low-minded violence and despotism with them.

After London's primary appeal is the novelty of its precociously postapocalyptic setting. The story, prose, and characters are uninspired, at best, and Jefferies' social and environmental messages are somewhat muddled, perhaps even superficially contradictory. As a historical curiosity, it's certainly worth a read. But it never lives up to the evocative hook of its opening lines.