Carry their sun with them

Icy seas: photo by Dylan Thompson on Pexels.com

The World in Winter
(original title The Long Winter)
by Sam Youd, writing as John Christopher.
Introduction by Hari Kunzru.
Penguin Worlds,
Penguin Books, 2016 (1962).

‘Put fire in their hands and they will not be afraid. They will carry their sun with them even here.’

‘The sun brings life,’ he said, ‘not death.’

Pt 3, 5

In the 1960s it was believed that we were due to a return to a Little Ice Age, an interglacial cooling such as those beginning around 1650, 1770 and 1850, each separated from the next by a warmer interval. Triggers suggested for this cooling included volcanic activity, changes in oceanic circulation, alterations in orbit or the tilt of the earth’s axis, reductions in human populations from war or disease, and cyclical decreases in solar irradiation or insolation.

In The World in Winter (first published in 1962 as The Long Winter) the author plumps for the final explanation as the cause of the so-called Fratellini winter, a rapid and drastic climatic change which sees much of the northern hemisphere above 35° latitude disabled by snow and ice packs in the sea, including Britain where the novel starts.

Here is where we meet Andrew Leedon, a television documentary maker, and through his eyes we view radical changes not only in living conditions but also in geopolitics, society at large and personal relationships. Ultimately where will loyalties lie – if, that is, one manages to survive?

© C A Lovegrove

It feels strange to be contemplating a postulated world in winter amidst our current climate crisis with rising temperatures and burning forests, especially when even six decades ago the immanent reality of global warming was well understood; but it suits a novel of many ambiguities for the reader to consider what-ifs in which situations are turned on their heads. What if, for example, a late centre of Empire like Britain were to find roles reversed and former colonies like Nigeria became the destination of economic migrants fleeing a distant island in turmoil? How would those refugees from a moribund country expect to be treated?

Andrew becomes one of those displaced people. His wife Carol has left him for a close though influential friend David; his job in television disappears when blizzards render most power-reliant technologies irrelevant; arriving in Lagos with David’s estranged wife Madeleine his status as a European lacking funds  renders him a persona non grata as far as employment and accommodation are concerned.

Will an act of kindness in the past change his and Madeleine’s prospects in Nigeria? And if offered would he welcome a chance to return to the arctic wasteland of his former home to seek something he had lost?

Sam Youd

Sharing features seen in John Wyndham’s apocalyptic novels from the 1950s (such as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes) The World in Winter is part of a genre that writer Brian Aldiss once dismissed as ‘catastrophe cosy’ – that is, they usually featured a lone white hero, almost invariably British, who somehow managed to survive a fairly plausible global catastrophe, despite all the odds, salvaging hope for an improving future by means of sheer guts and intelligence. This novel fits that blueprint, it’s true, but though in this respect it’s a book of its time – as Hari Kunzru’s excellent introduction to this edition points out – it also tackles issues of race and ethnicity with a degree of sensitivity as well as acuity, even if it ends with a sense of division and resignation, reflecting contemporary attitudes.

The narrative is very much focused on a quintet of characters, although we come across a fair few incidental players. Andrew comes across as sympathetic though we may not always like or agree with his actions, and we quite soon sense his friend David – his only British friend? – is not someone in whom to place implicit trust. As for the women in Andrew’s life, Carol and Maddie, they seemed a little opaque to me, and I wasn’t entirely convinced about their sudden abandonments of their men.

It was the Nigerian, Abonitu, who most impressed me: he was principally motivated by honesty, gratitude and friendship, but he was also pragmatic, brave and prone to give certain individuals the benefit of the doubt, not always to his benefit. But he was always aware of a general tendency towards ‘othering’ people of a different ethnicity, culture or skin colour, and doubting their loyalty according to those criteria, especially when, during a Nigerian expedition to ice-bound Britain, Andrew suggests that equatorial Africans might behave as white colonialists did in Africa: “The sun brings life, not death,” Andrew pointedly says, expressing his sublimated fears.

‘Catastrophe cosy’ or not, The World in Winter is an engrossing read with much to say about colonialism, prejudice and loyalty, all set at a period of transition. As well as implicitly referencing the period it was written in – end of Empire, immigration from former colonies – it has continued relevance sixty-plus years on when geopolitical and climatic crises are resulting in population stresses not just in Britain, of course, but around the world.

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