by Hari Kunzru
The light of the sun is getting weaker. An Arctic winter descends on Britain, rendering it all but uninhabitable. London is fenced off from the rest of the country, which is left to descend into starvation and anarchy. Good speculative fiction knows how to find appropriate metaphors for the reader’s anxieties and desires, and in 1962, when John Christopher’s The World in Winter was published, the fear of decline was pervasive. The Suez debacle had exposed Britain’s inability to project power without the support of the Americans. Decolonization was stripping the mother country of her once-mighty empire, as immigration from those former colonial possessions was changing the lily-white complexion of her streets. It seems unlikely that Enoch Powell was a science fiction fan, but if he ever put down his copy of the Aeneid and picked up this novel, he would have found something to make his rivers of blood run cold. Here is the very thing that the old demagogue most feared, the story of what happens when ‘the black man has the whip hand over the white man’.
In Christopher’s tale of national and racial Untergang, the sun has set, there’s no more pink on the map, and the centre of civilization and commerce has moved southwards to Africa. White British refugees find themselves grubbing for a living in the slums of Lagos, servants and supplicants to black masters. The World in Winter is both a reactionary jeremiad (fear the loss of your status!) and a progressive thought experiment. The reader is invited to lament the terrible fate of a middle-class white hero, who finds himself a beggar in a far-off land where the colour of his skin counts against him. Imagine, for a moment, Mr Powell, that the Oxford brogue is on the other foot. Wouldn’t you perhaps hope for a kinder reception than ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’?
Christopher is no white supremacist, indeed his anger at crude prejudice is there on the page, but The World In Winter is also a book of its time, which is to say that it’s animated by a sense that racial difference is a kind of abyss, and between black and white there can be no complete understanding or identification. The plot hinges on ideas about racial loyalty and betrayal that one only hears today in the rhetoric of the extreme right. But for me, at least, its very ambiguity makes it interesting. With immigration once again at the top of the national agenda, it’s a novel that still has the power to thrill and disturb, performing one of the signal services of fiction, forcing the reader to inhabit other realities, other possibilities and perspectives, making the present order seem less fixed and immutable than before.