Anthony Daniels, The Spectator, 31 December 2005
"Invigorating, clever and often very funny....A good satire should be both bitter and funny, and this book is both."
Sally Cousins, Sunday Telegraph, 8 January 2006
"Intelligent and thought-provoking"
Synopsis
In the "Great Before" the anti-globalisation movement gets a lot of what it wants: consumption of fossils fuel ceases, the soil becomes the subject of great reverence and everyone goes back to eating local food. But in other ways the result is far from being a utopia: warfare erupts between neighbouring English villages and the poor are pressed into feudal service. Large parts of the country come into the grip of a Christian Taliban which prohibits all use of machinery and suppresses scientific learning. In this startling and highly-intelligent analysis of a post-industrial world, activities which we take for granted are reduced to myth and legend. We see the industrial world through the eyes of those who must live with its aftermath, and who blame their every misfortune on the greed and callousness of the people who preceded them.
From the Inside Flap
England, 2051. Matthew Gonne, Professor of Old Lessons at the University of cambridge, has been mortally exhausted by his journmey to London to attend an exhibition which purports to demonstrate the imminent revival of lost industrial civilisation. Before he dies, he has one last ambition: to write a letter to the people who inhabited the world of his youth. Little by little he reveals how the achievements of that world have been reduced to myth and legend, and how its legacy is being erased by an ascetic belief system which rejects all technology and blames all ills upon the preceding, industrial age
About the Author
Ross Clark is a columnist on the Spectator and the Times
