the death of grass (john christopher (sam youd))

The Death of Grass is one of those strange dystopian post-war texts. There are obvious points of comparison with Butler’s Parable of the Sower, with Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, not to mention more obliquely, 1984. Part of the reason for this could be attributed to the nuclear angst which gripped so much of the world in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that weapons of mass destruction were at hand. The Death of Grass postulates a British prime minister planning to use nuclear weapons against his own cities. The other reason, perhaps, is that society needs dystopian narratives just as much as it needs utopian narratives. Christopher’s book is great at puncturing the myth of the British stiff upper lip. Following famine in the Far East which has lead to terrible food riots, the British characters are convinced that “the same thing would never happen here”. And then, of course, it does.

The book is also prescient in so far as it sets up the idea of a virus that will destroy civilised society as it is understood. The virus, as the title suggests, is one that affects grasses, destroying the world’s food supplies, leading to famine and social breakdown. Christopher’s narrative traces the build up to the crisis breaking, before it hones in on the efforts of John to get his family out of London and then across the country to his brother’s stockaded farm in the Lake District. The action is compelling and strangely believable, with the author examining not just the social breakdown but also the moral breakdown of the individuals participating in the flight from London. Englishness is no defence against the desperation that comes with just trying to stay alive, in fact it would appear to be a hindrance.

It might be seen that The Death of Grass is as much as takedown of Britain as it is a prophetic text. Like Orwell and Pinter, he roots out the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet. It seems ironic, given this, that the writer’s greatest success came following the adaptation of another of his dystopian novels into a major BBC children’s series.