R.C. Sherriff - The Hopkins Manuscript

***Spoiler Alert***

R.C.Sherriff is best known for his World War One play Journey's End and as the screenwriter for such classic films as The Dambusters and Goodbye, Mr Chips. His 1939 novel The Hopkins Manuscript is however not as well known. I hope that this review will help encourage a new audience to enjoy this remarkable comic dystopian novel.

Edgar Hopkins is a snob. A retired teacher he lives alone with a housekeeper, and breeds chickens. His prizewinning poultry is perhaps his greatest success and he coverts every possible prize. On occasion he travels to London, where as a member of the British Astronomy Club he surrounds himself with people whom he imagines are intelligent, basking in their reflected knowledge. It's a singular existence. He is rude to almost everyone else. Feuds with most of his neighbours in the tiny village were he lives and imagines himself to be better than the rest. In short, he is a middle class snob, desperate to be noticed by his betters and to get to sup at the table of those richer, more famous and more learned than he.

One evening, as a member of the Astronomy society he is let into an enormous secret. The worlds' governments have discovered that the Moon has come adrift and is heading towards Earth. In a few months it will impact and if the world survives it will be on a very different basis.

As the moon approaches the world awakens to the threat. Enormous resources are poured into buildings shelters and preparing for catastrophe. Hopkins' is gradually transformed. He learns the comradeship of work, makes friends and tries to "make do and carry on". As one of the few survivors he begins to rebuild with a few neighbours (albeit ones from the landowning classes). Its the happiest time of his life. Cut adrift from the government and state, the local village fends for itself. Bartering becomes the norm. Hopkins learns new skills and loses old prejudices. Almost.

This is a very funny book. Hopkins reminds me of Mr. Pooter in Diary of a Nobody. The humour is similar, the reader laughs at Hopkins' idiocy and class jealously. We laugh at his snobbery, maintained as the world is literarily on the brink of disaster but we also will him on. We want him to survive. And survive he does.

But. The opening chapter of The Hopkins Manuscript tells a different story. The book has been found a thousand years later, and published, with even more snobbishness, by the Imperial Research Press of Addis Ababa. They know nothing of Britain. It disappeared and its damp climate destroyed all records. What happened to Hopkins? To London? To Europe? 

This then is the second half of the book, and while the humour remains, there is darkness. You see as civilisation rebuilds, the governments of the Earth also reestablish control. The Moon has not disappeared, instead it has crashed into the Atlantic ocean and there left a vast area of unclaimed land and mineral resources, coal and oil. The rebuilding nations all demand their share, and Britain demands access so it can maintain its Empire.

The tensions erupt, inevitably, into war and Hopkins losses everything. The happiness he knew will living in the new world, unencumbered by fears of politics and economics falls apart. Having a chicken to lay eggs now is a luxury. England starves. So does Hopkins.

The cleverness of the book of course is twofold. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her book A Paradise Built in Hell. Disaster does not make us into mindless zombies or characters in a Mad Max film. It leads us to try to help each other. It is the reassertion of capitalism, of the state, of class, that drags the world back to disaster and the second is far worse than the first. It's a subtle jibe. Sherriff was writing on the eve of World War Two. He had lived through and documented the horrors of the first. He was now staring down at another. The Hopkins Manuscript is his commentary on what is happening - and its is very good indeed.

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