After a one week hiatus (I was in Ireland for a wedding), I'm back! Brother in the Land is a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1984. My being born in 1982, obviously I didn't read it until a number of years later - I believe I picked it out for extra-curricular reading when I was 11-12, making it circa 1993-1994. If you're looking for a literary masterpiece, or something highly lauded, this isn't for you. That said, it has stayed with me all these years, so there is definitely something powerful within the prose worth taking a peek at.
The plot revolves around the ordeals of Danny Lodge, an unlucky survivor of a nuclear war that has decimated England and perhaps the world. The intriguing hook of this book is that it shows an unflinching perspective on what a post-nuclear landscape would be like; crops fail, animals and even humans mutate with catastrophic consequences, and people die slowly of radiation poisoning. In this environment, unlike say TV show Jericho which proposed a relatively swift recovery period after the bombs have dropped, these survivors are seemingly cursed at every turn: running out of food, stuck in a barren land, highly susceptible to radiation sickness.
I know this sounds depressing, but that is the point: Swindells intended this young adult book to act as the strongest possible nuclear-weapon deterrent for future generations. It absolutely does the trick, dispelling the now-popular and prevalent myth that if you survive the apocalypse, you'd be given a glimpse of a barren-yet-beautiful caveman utopia, the kind Fight Club's Tyler Durden longed for. Having read this book, I came to realise how easy and idyllic modern life really was - struggle, however romantically viewed, will always be bitter and violent and stacked heavily towards failure. If you want a reminder of how lucky you really are, take a look at this novel.
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