The Second Sleep: the Sunday Times #1 bestselling novel

St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 26h April 2021.

The second sleep. Robert Harris.

Most of the readers in this group seemed to feel the same about this book: it was an easy read, cunningly put together, twists and turns, quite absorbing, a very interesting concept – a bit frightening, even, given our current world context - but nobody liked the ending!

The beginning of the story, and the revelation that civilisation as we know it had been destroyed and the time setting was not the past, as it first appeared, but the distant future, was appreciated by most. Some of the characters were criticised as being ‘a bit too convenient for the plot’ (mad scientist/archaeologist; bluff industrialist; naive priest; simple villagers, big bad bishop, etc), and the relationships as somewhat predictable, but in general, the plot held the reader’s interest up to here.

The author’s treatment of the conflict between Science and Religion provoked different comments: why should Christianity prevail after the apocalypse? Why, if Christianity is so important at this stage, are there duplicitous bishops? Was the apocalypse God’s punishment for something or other, and if so, why would God administer further punishment to people trying to find out what happened in the past? Did Harris tell us anything we didn’t already know about the surges of religious risings in the past, or about the treatment of heretics through the ages? Is, perhaps, the use of organised religion as the oppressive force a ready-made device for an author? Why was the church so powerful? On this subject one reader, a guest for this month, liked the way the medieval churches were depicted at sanctuaries or ‘arks’ in which people sheltered in the time after the apocalypse, which made it easy for the Church to be seen as a viable alternative to the Science which had brought about Armageddon.

The ending disappointed most readers, some of whom were hoping to be told what had brought about the Apocalypse, and that the discoveries at the Devil’s Chair would be some kind of revelation or possibly a route by which to reconstitute society. None of this happened, and the impression was received that ‘the author couldn’t decide how to finish it so he just killed them all off’; or ‘a let-down’; ‘frustrating, and we did not find out the answers to posed questions’; ‘ending unsatisfactory – I wanted it to be pulled together with a view of the future from then on’; and ‘didn’t live up to its potential’. Discussion about this book was limited due to social distancing and no face-to-face meeting, but the idea was put forward that the loss of knowledge was so great that those looking at the remains at the Devil’s Chair had no means of making any sense of them – that the destruction had been so all-embracing that not even memories of the past remained. This also is depressing and frustrating, of course, and it seems that the reader in general was looking for something else. The guest reader added a comment about Morgenstern, the leader of the doomed technocrats. The name, a German one, in English means Morning Star. Morning Star was, in Christian mythology, the name God gave Lucifer before casting him out. It was also a name given to Christ - hence good and evil, hope and despair in the same name. Shadwell hoped Morgenstern represented hope – that the evidence at Devil’s Chair might be an ‘ark’ created by Morgenstern with the aim of resurrecting society; but the evidence suggests the hope was false - Morgenstern having massacred the native valley dwellers so that his followers could take over the valley. In fact he was motivated by the same self-serving urge which brought about the calamity.

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Further comments were about the title, which might indicate a second descent into a kind of ‘rural sleep’ after the destruction of the technological age; and that the subject was a rather ironic one to be reading at this moment – particularly as a ‘pandemic resistant to antibiotics’ is mentioned in it.

The guest reader pointed up the constant references to the bitten apple motif, from a priest in a society heavily controlled by an Old Testament church, as referring to the fall of man, suggesting that these devices are the underlying cause of the apocalypse.

This book was read during April 2021 and the continuing social distancing because of the Covid-19 virus, and so the discussion was not 'live' as usual, but took place via a Facebook group, email and telephone conversations.