A Slow World Ending
In fiction, reporting the gradual collapse of a society over time presents more of a challenge than the classic disaster-ends-the-world-as-we-know-it trope.
There is intrinsic drama in a catastrophic precipitating event — such as plague (as in Christopher’s own The Death of Grass) or a massive comet hitting the Earth (as in Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle).
“Gradual collapse” is what Christopher — famous for the children's Tripod trilogy, as well as the aforementioned Death of Grass — attempts in his novel, Pendulum, published in 1968, twelve years after his breakthrough novel Death of Grass.
Biker like an icon:
The novel oozes a 1960s vibe.
The slow economic down-spiral Christopher imagines in Pendulum results in societal unrest, particularly among students, who are manipulated by a branch of the liberal intelligentsia to form an alliance with disaffected youth of motorcycle gangs who together rebel against the government.
The gangs, seeing their chance amid economic and political upheaval, move to exert power through violence, overcoming an increasingly weakened system of law and order and the police, and in this way take control of the streets.
The story is divided into three main sections (together with a fourth, shorter coda), each section marking a short jump forward in time and a substantial further collapse of the economy and (what we would consider) first-world societal norms.
The narrative focuses on several members of a wealthy upper-middle-class English family, and their tribulations during the gradual descent of British society into chaos. Their grand family house becomes a target for one of the motorcycle gangs.
Such gangs, modeled after the mods and rockers then extant in the UK, and perhaps also the more intimidating Hells Angels in the USA, are very much of the novel’s time — the 1960s — when such groups were generally feared and reviled by the middle classes.
Room with a view-point:
The three narrative strands do not intertwine to generate tension.
The motorcycle gang takes over the house, holds the family hostage, and subjects them to a cascading series of humiliations while, at the same time, the family members suffer a form of middle-class restrain and moral paralysis, which prevents them from fighting back effectively.
The decline in law and order is followed by the rise of a religious group that sets itself against the anarchy of the youth gangs. A wayward younger brother-in-law within the family, a kind of genteel black sheep, is attracted to the new religion, and gains a position of power through his proximity to the religion’s founder.
The religious movement comes to hold sway among people who have learned to fear and hate the motorcycle gangs, and this shift in power (the pendulum of the title) leads to an inevitable confrontation between the two groups, with the religious movement gaining a decisive victory.
Now in control, the religious movement enforces a strict, authoritarian form of religious conformity in order to hold the previously mostly lawless society together once again (another pendulum swing — away from English secular civil society).
With this shifting power comes a shift in power within the family. The wayward brother-in-law, through his position in the new region, now holds sway over the fate of the once successful and powerful family head, resulting in a final reversal (pendulum swing) for the once well-to-do family.
The Swinging 60s:
The story truly shines only at the very end.
Christopher is only partially successful in his portrayal of this slow slide into religious fundamentalism, partly because he splits his narrative point-of-view between three characters, whose plot lines are not particularly dramatically interlinked, and so do not play off each other to generate tension (until the very end), and partly because the novel is very much of its time (the 1960s mods and rockers are no more in the UK), and, as a result, has not aged well.
The Death of Grass suffers a similar problem for the first quarter of its length, being very much an artifact of the 1950s (racism included), but saves itself once society collapses in the face of famine through Christoper’s sharply observed depiction of the raw edge of human nature.
In Pendulum, it is only towards the very end of the novel that the deepening collapse allows Christopher to again show us what humans are capable of when the going gets really tough, and he is certainly good at holding a mirror up to humanity.
But, overall, Pendulum is more an artifact of its time than a timeless masterpiece and, as such, not a novel I would recommend if you have not read Death of Grass, a true classic, and Cloud on Silver (Sweeney's Island in the US) a clever and cutting take on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Guy Riddihough
P.S.
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