Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory palace for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975)

3.5/5 (Good)

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages.

In its simplest form the story revolves around the figure of Demetrios, a survivor of the limited nuclear conflict (the Twenty-Minute War of 1993) that plunged the United States into a tapestry of petty fragmented states and aborted democratic dreams. Demetrios is a storyteller. He ruminates on his birthplace, his memories, and the history of the King’s Republic of Nuber and its claims that it’s resurrecting the United States of America and the “Golden Age” (15). His storytelling runs afoul of Nuber’s increasingly draconian government as its descends into authoritarianism. He must set off with a group of devoted followers and a dream to resurrect a new democratic community based on love and compassion for all. Pangborn’s fictions give space for all forms of sexual variation (Demetrios is in a ménage à trois with a woman and a man) and strong characters with disabilities (the narrator is one of multiple characters with dwarfism).

Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. The metafictional ruminations feel like tired and inarticulate regurgitations (without the poetry) of Davy. It’s a struggle to identify a planned purpose for the jarring narrative shifts as the novel comes to a close. There isn’t a deeply vivacious figures at the center of it all. Demetrios could be but Pangborn seems to grow tired of the older man as the story progresses.

That said, in a historical moment where the forces of crypto-fascism seems to be making massive, destructive, and disturbing inroads in American government, The Company of Glory (1975) provided a wholesome salve. It’s rare to encounter a quiet post-apocalyptic novel in which the characters actively aspire to create new democratic communities in the wasteland. Too often stories shift to espousing various forms of dictatorship, all dolled up as good American values, as a necessity for survival. I’m looking at you Alas, Babylon (1959). Even American presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower ruminated on the need to turn America into a regimented camp if the bombs hit.

While a half-fledged echo of his magisterial Hugo-nominated Davy (1964), elements of The Company of Glory will still be appreciated by Pangborn’s fans. You will also be simultaneously disappointed and wish Pangborn had applied a bit more of his magic to the pages. If you’re new to his work, pick up Davy first.

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2. Harold Mead’s Mary’s Country (1957)

3.25/5 (Above Average)

Imagine William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) simultaneously collapsed into a brutal Cold War-inspired post-apocalyptic novel à la John Christopher’s contemporary The Death of Grass (1956) with elements of the classic quest. Out of this strange amalgamation comes Harold Mead’s intriguing oddity Mary’s Country (1957). Superior to his first novel Bright Phoenix (1955), Mary’s Country (1957) imagines a future dystopia with nebulous geopolitics. Channeling Western Europe’s 50s fear over rising Cold War tensions, Mead suggests Europe, after an ill-defined cataclysm, will be conquered by the Totes (Totalitarians: i.e. Communists). The United States, the “Dems,” unleash a biological attack on the Totes. The third powerbock, Asia, watches from afar.

The novel follows a group of young children within Tote-controlled Europe. These children were indoctrinated in communal camps to be the Guardians of the People (the two classes which appear to be perpetuated by eugenics). As the biological weapon kills off the adults, they must set off across the depopulated and violent landscape. They are “guided” by a collective imaginary world called Mary’s country (after one of the children who gives voice to the place). Soon they encounter various bands of People, a People child whom they adopt, a dog, and a new, and horrifying, root-formed idol called The Watcher. The children believe the idol, think symbolic manifestation of the iconic pig’s head in Lord of the Flies, must be appeased in order for the group to make it to Mary’s Country.

As with Mead’s Bright Phoenix (1955), he’s less interested in describing the mechanisms of the future state and more interested in the slow evolution of characters coming to grips with their indoctrination and the brutal world that birthed them. Mary’s Country does not hold back its punches. It’s an odd work.

I’ve consumed a lot of forgotten British post-apocalyptic novels as of late: Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), Robert Duncan’s The Last Adam (1952) (didn’t manage to review this miserable novel), Philip McCutchan’s A Time For Survival (1966) and The Day of the Coastwatch (1968), Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn (1952), Reginald Hall’s Albion! Albion! (1974), Dave Wallis’ Only Lovers Left Alive (1964), Adrian Mitchell’s The Bodyguard (1970), etc. And many more await!

Recommended only for fans of lesser-known British apocalypse.

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