The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff

So glad to have finally finished my 1939 book for A Century of Books, The Hopkins Manuscript, by R. C. Sherriff and published by Persephone. For Christmas I usually have my daughter who was living in London, now in Liverpool, just stop by the Persephone shop and buy me a couple books. She did so again this year and decided to see if they had something sciency, since that is her area and I do have an interest in reading up on some science. She came up with the science fiction book that has taken me three weeks to read. I am not one bit sorry that I have read it, but I HAD to keep putting it aside.

R. C. Sherriff is an amazing writer but this was one of the bleakest books I have in my entire life read. (Others say they found hope in it, but I found precious little.) The Hopkins Manuscript of which Sherriff writes was penned in the late 1940s and found by an expedition of the Royal Society of Abyssinia 1000 years later. Every vestige of “white man” by which the Abyssinians mean all Europeans and, I suppose North Americans, has been completely wiped away. All books, all art, all architecture, everything looted, raided, and destroyed in anger during the first hundred years following the cataclysm. After rebuilding society, the Abyssinians had hoped now to learn about the history of the West, only to find that the destruction had been too complete. England had been a ruin, completely desolate for those thousand years, but this pioneer expedition had hope to find some remnants of history there as it had not been colonized as had the rest of Europe.

Unfortunately, the pioneer expedition found virtually everything in England was destroyed by the constant of damp weather. We are introduced to the manuscript which follows this report from the Abyssinians. Keep in mind that this is science fiction of the sort that is meant to show you human nature and not to demonstrate the advances of science and technology. Found in a thermos in a brick wall, the manuscript recounts the final years of the life of Edgar Hopkins, a middle-aged, retired schoolmaster, and British citizen.

Hopkins is in many ways an utter delight and in others, just a real pill. He isn’t of the aristocracy, but he is a gentleman (and doesn’t let you forget it), and studied at Cambridge. He thinks rather highly of himself. He is a breeder of chickens and has had several prize-winning hens and derives much pleasure and glory from this activity. This will give you idea of his self-esteem: “At Christmas, right before the cataclysm will be made known, he shops and says, “For the vicar himself I purchased a copy of The Poultry Breeder’s Annual hoping that would excite his interest and make him more interesting to talk to.”!!!

He is also a member of the British Lunar Society whose meetings he attends regularly in London. It’s a pleasure for him to leave his home in the country and go to London to meet with other scholarly men occasionally. However, one night he goes to the society’s meeting, to find that the president is in quite a state. Disaster has been made known to him and now he must deliver the bad news to all of this society. Further, they must keep this news quiet, not telling a soul. For to tell people the news that the moon was going to crash into the earth would no doubt spark riots and cause danger and psychological trauma where it need not. People would not realize for a few months that the earth was becoming closer and closer, but it was thought better to give them the couple of months they would not notice and only prepare them when it became clear that there was danger.

So Hopkins tells of his months of knowing this information and not being able to share it and how difficult that was. I found this section to be quite bleak, but then how horrible would that be! Then, when people know and the government starts organizing people to prepare to withstand the cataclysm and to sustain life, he becomes involved in the village life in a way he never had before and becomes much more human by being associated with people of all ranks of society.

Out for a walk in a storm, he met Robin Parker, the son of Colonel Parker of the Manor House, and Robin’s sister Pat. He had just recently met Robin at the train station and had admired him, and now he saw Pat as being a strong young woman who could withstand much. He remembered them as children riding across the downs on their ponies. The three struck up an instant friendship leading to much back and forthing for the first time of Edgar and the Manor House. He is truly enlivened by their vitality and more gregarious natures. In the end, it is his friendship with Robin and Pat that sustain life for him through most of the seven years he lived after the cataclysm.

Though he worked very hard with the village on the dugouts created to safely hold them through the cataclysm, in the end he decided to stay at home as had the Manor House. This turned out to be the saving of his life. When he wakes up the day after the moon has hit the earth to find out he still alive, he goes out to survey and finds that most of the village is underwater and mud, but he chances on Robin. Robin has sustained an injury to his head, but Pat is perfectly fine and the Admiral is dead. At first it appears that only the three of them have survived and they live together in Hopkin’s house as the Manor House has been virtually destroyed. The decide to pool their resources in order to survive.

This part of the book is very charming and uplifting and provides a respite in the bleakness of what came before and what you know must be coming after. Hopkins has made no secret of the fact that as he is writing the manuscript he is coming to his final days as is the rest of England. The description of how the three make life together and become self-sustaining is appealing. For not only have they discovered that Humphrey, the Manor House's farmer is alive, they discover that about a hundred or so people survived in the nearby town of Mulcaster. These people are starting to mold a life using their hands and ingenuity to bring together community. The three in the Hopkins community have managed to grow more vegetable and grain, plus they have extra fish and rabbits and later chickens. Hopkins found his star hen and purchased with vouchers an inferior cockerel and they are able to barter the eggs and other excess for other things that they need. The people who survived the cataclysm are creating a new society for themselves, one without rank, based on merit, and what they can do with the resources they have.

But one day news comes that even though they withstood the cataclysm, they may not be able to withstand what will follow. And then it becomes very bleak again. The moon had landed in the Atlantic and one could even walk from Britain to New York. It is discovered to have rich resources of gold, oil, and coal and once again mankind is fighting over these resources and the control they will have over them. I never like to give away the end of the book, so I won’t here either, though it is not hard to guess.

Sherriff also wrote a couple of other novels published by Persephone: Greengates, which I enjoyed, and The Fortnight in September, which I also have read for ACOB. They don’t often publish books by men so these are quite unusual in their niche. Sherriff had been wounded in Ypres and wanted to write, but like most had to make a living. However, he wrote a highly successful play based on men in the trenches, called Journey’s End (currently a major motion picture), and through that was invited to write screenplays for some of the biggest film hits of the time (The Invisible Man and Goodbye, Mr. Chips are two), so that he was able to make his living as a writer.

Before closing this already long blog post, I want to comment on the theological implications of the cataclysm as expressed in The Hopkins Manuscript. My comments are in italics and brackets.

I believed in my heart of hearts that nothing very serious would happen to the earth. The moon would go back to its place: it would not hit us--could not hit us, for reason told me that the Divine Power that controlled our destinies would not so suddenly and callously lose interest in us. [Absolutely, there is no way a God of love, the God I serve, would ever lose interest in us.] God would not permit His handiwork to be blasted to senseless destruction. [I’m not so sure of this--some little bit of it maybe. I certainly don’t believe he would ever allow the destruction of his ‘whole’ creation. But I am beginning to wonder if he will allow us, in our free will, to blow up our own piece of creation, the earth.] I could well imagine a certain hysterical type of preacher crying out that God was destroying us because we had proved ourselves unworthy of Him, but I had no patience with this silly stuff. [I agree with Hopkins in this: it wouldn’t be because we were unworthy, but because we had made choices that caused the destruction, global warming, nuclear weapons, and so on.] If God could create us then God could control our brains and minds: [I don’t believe he controls our brains and minds--God created us and gave us free will and our brains and minds can do what they want whether it is choose to be a believer or person of goodwill or follow on the bandwagon on hatred and wanton destruction of the earth.] if we had failed it was because He had been unable to make better creatures of us, and that was His fault--not ours. God must have as much reason and as much sense as the visible beings that He had created [much more, I’d say, based on the beings I see around me!] and it was most unlikely that He would advertise His own shortcomings by destroying us.

It did not occur to me that this all-important world of ours was one of a thousand million worlds eddying in the great hive of the universe. It did not occur to me that God had an intense, burning interest in them all--that even as we seethed and strutted on our own little earth, God might be planning and creating life upon a million others. [Yes, I believe God has unending fecundity and can create forever.] If two of His thousand million worlds were to collide and destroy each other there was no special reason why He should be more concerned than I should be if two specks of dust ran into one another in my breakfast-room when Mrs Buller was sweeping the carpet. [What WOULD be the point in that. If God creates, then he is going to care. I have no patience with the idea of a God who would create a world to abandon care for it. Even if we senselessly destroy our earth, I do not believe that God will ever stop caring about it.]

But these thoughts have come to me only in the bitterness of the past seven years. Upon that sunlit autumn morning I am afraid my vanity persuaded me that God would never permit the world to end until I personally had finished with it. [Hah, I’d say this is the point of view of most people.] (p. 54-55)

Of the moon itself, Hopkins states that he

no longer regarded it as an enemy--I understood it for what it really was: a calm, lovely thing that had shed its sublime beauty upon the earth since time began--a faithful servant, wrenched from its divine course by a devilish power that had sent it plunging against its will to its own and the earth’s destruction. [I don’t believe the moon is a servant, but it doesn’t have will like us, so it is certainly not its fault if it is being adversely used. But what a lovely line about the moon: it had shed…] (p. 83)

Though he doesn’t share his belief in the outcome the cataclysm would provoke, Hopkins has great esteem for the local vicar. He really eloquently characterizes the vicar’s point of view.

This school of thought was represented in its highest form by Hubert Edwards, our Vicar. From the evening upon which he first received the news I believe that Mr. Edwards was convinced that the end had come. He did not accept it as a dramatic gesture of God’s wrath: [excellent point--who wants to serve a God of wrath (well too many people these days apparently want to, but I don’t believe in such a God] he humbly and reverently believed that God in His wisdom had decided that the earth had served its purpose as an abode for His creatures, and that He was about to place it amongst the milliards of dead worlds that had, in their own time, played their inscrutable part in the Universal Scheme. His faith was unshaken, for Heaven, in Hubert Edward’s mind, was not local to the earth; [This was clearly the belief of most Christians in this time, and indeed in our time, but I believe earth is and will remain when God’s kingdom is established fully. Why would God create something of such great beauty and grandeur to abolish it?] it embraced every living creature that had played its part in every world in the unfathomable spaces around us [Yes, this is why my dog Sparky will be with us in heaven!]...Perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to Hubert Edwards is that everyone attended his services every Sunday, and everyone secured renewed hope from them, no matter whether they belonged to the ‘all is well’ school, ‘the moon will graze us’ party or the fatalists. He spoke as he had spoken for twenty-five years in Beadle church, simply because he had spoken his best from the day he came to us. [These last two lines are simply the finest elegy I have read for a priest.] (p. 147)

I won’t comment much more, but Persephone do say that they published this as a warning about global warming. In my theology, it is imperative for the people of God and of goodwill to set about seeing creation as a partner to us in God’s revelation and that we must be about promoting cosmic flourishing, not destruction.