In Review
When the English Fall
Amid climate change, terrorism, a global refugee crisis, nuclear standoff, and democracies traveling vectors unknown, the appeal of postapocalyptic fiction is not hard to understand. “The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever,” novelist Jason Heller wrote recently, “and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.”
The characters on the edge of the abyss in David Williams’s debut novel wear coverings and suspenders. Set among the Amish of Lancaster County, the book explores a near future so imaginable that even those who roll their eyes at doomsaying—not to mention Amish-themed fiction—may find themselves brooding and watchful after living in its pages. Cathartic or not, postapocalyptic fiction is our culture’s handwriting on the wall. In this case, it’s in the script of an Amish farmer.
The apocalypse in When the English Fall arrives as a solar storm that knocks out the power grid, communications systems, and all the networks upon which so much of modern life depends. Williams’s plotline was inspired by a solar storm in 1859 known as the Carrington Event, the damage of which now seems positively quaint—it busted telegraph systems. Were such a storm to occur today, the scaffolds of advanced capitalism—including global communication, transportation networks, banking systems, and medical care—would fall like toothpicks. Along with them would fall the “English”—the Amish term for those who are not Amish. Buffered from harm by never having climbed very far up the scaffold of modernity, the Amish world would continue and become a safe place for the English to land.
