PhilPaine.com

Writ­ten in 1984, when the Cold War was heat­ing up again, this is a nar­ra­tive of an Eng­lish teenager’s sur­vival after a nuclear war. Swindell attempts to con­vey the utter hope­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion. Steeped in the British class sys­tem, he assumes that the rich and pow­er­ful would do every­thing to pro­tect them­selves. and sim­ply exter­mi­nate any­one incon­ve­nient to them. Per­haps this would have been true — I don’t know British soci­ety well enough to judge. The book gives a rea­son­ably accu­rate por­trayal of the effects of a nuclear war on an ordi­nary region (at least in terms of the sci­en­tific knowl­edge then avail­able). As per­sonal dra­ma, it is very effec­tive. Peo­ple who now imag­ine that the world is a new­ly ter­ri­fy­ing place, mere­ly because a hand­ful of ter­ror­ists can plant bombs in planes, have either for­got­ten, or are inca­pable of imag­in­ing, the kind of anx­i­ety peo­ple lived under dur­ing the peri­ods when the immi­nent incin­er­a­tion of the plan­et was some­thing to wor­ry about.