JOHN CHRISTOPHER - The Death of Grass (1952)

John Christopher’s 1952 apocalyptic novel may not be the first to theorise on the results of a worldwide catastrophe, but it must surely be one of the bleakest.

It reminded me of Anna Kavan’s deeply disturbing ‘Ice,’ published some two decades later, but rather than climate change as the culprit for civilisation collapse, with Christopher it’s a grass-killing virus originating in…. China!

First it kills off the rice, leaving millions of deaths and civil unrest in Asia as the West looks on with a kind of thinly-disguised racist schadenfreude.

Scientists rush to counter it, but it fails and then other grains like wheat become targeted as the virus mutates and heads west.

A couple of friends are forewarned of the impending governmental collapse as food stocks dwindle, and race north with their families to a prescient brother’s mountain retreat long prepared for such a situation.

John Christopher

The speed at which murder, rape and looting becomes the norm after central government vanishes is truly disturbing, as is the kind of new feudalistic / baronial order which emerges within days and which everyone immediately accepts with a grim fatalism.

Depressing, shocking, but not at all unrealistic, one suspects.

This is a forgotten masterpiece and timely warning deserves to be much better known.

I rated it 10/10