The Second Sleep by Robert Harris | review by Rafe McGregor

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

Hutchinson, hardback, £20.09, September 2019, ISBN 9781786331373

Robert Harris is an English novelist best known for his historical fiction, much of which has been adapted for the big screen. He began his writing career as a highly successful journalist and published several nonfiction books, including  Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986), which is interesting not just for the hoax itself, but the role played by Rupert Murdoch, who was a powerful and sinister force even then, in the early nineteen eighties. Harris’ breakout novel was also his first, Fatherland (1992), published off the back of Selling Hitler, and he has authored seventeen to date, five of which are about the Roman Empire and four of which are about the Second World War. As I mentioned in my review of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019), Fatherland is actually alternative history rather than history and there is a strong speculative element running through Harris’ oeuvre.

Archangel (1998) and The Ghost (2007) are also alternative histories and the latter foregrounds a technique Harris has perfected and for which he really should be better known, the twist in the tail of the tale. His trademark twists are not only convincing, but retrospectively imbue his narratives with fresh meaning (or, perhaps more accurately, reveal a hidden meaning that was there all along). Conclave (2016) is another example of the master at work, with a revelation so powerful that it switches the novel from a contemporary thriller to an(other) alternative history. The Fear Index (2011) combines alternative history (in this case, the Flash Crash of 6 May 2010) with both science fiction and horror and I’d classify it as science fiction in consequence of the role of AI (though, as far as I can remember, Harris does not use the term). And then there is The Second Sleep, which seems to be a more straightforward instantiation of science fiction.

The novel takes its name from the concept of biphasic, diphasic, or segmented sleep, what we would now think of as getting up in the middle of the night for one to two hours before going back to sleep. There is significant evidence for this practice in pre-Industrial Europe, when people typically went to sleep shortly after dusk and rose with the dawn. Activities in the middle, which was sometimes called ‘the watch’, typically included one or more of: prayer, reading, chores, sex, or visits to neighbours. The second sleep is thus, literally, the second round of sleep between dusk and dawn, following the hour or two of pottering around. There is less evidence that this practice continued into the nineteenth century, which makes sense given that it seems tied to natural patterns and rhythms, and the closest one gets to it now is the Southern European siesta, where there might be an hour’s nap during the day and then less sleep at night. The Second Sleep opens in England in 1468 and the first thing anyone with an interest in history will notice is that the content is filled with anachronisms and inaccuracies. (I was lucky in that, very unusually, I started the book without knowing anything at all about it, other than the authorship, and dived straight in without reading the blurb.) How, one wonders, is this possible in the work of such a critically acclaimed historical novelist?

Given my acquaintance with Harris’ work, I suspected the apparent errors were clues to a mystery and the suspicion was quickly confirmed when an Apple logo turns up after a few chapters. The 1468 is not Gregorian, but an alternative calendar that is being used in a post-apocalyptic England, which has reverted to a cultural and technological state that mixes the Medieval with the Romantic. The protagonist, Father Christopher Fairfax, and his supporting cast in Addicott St George are in fact living in humanity’s second sleep, a second Dark Age that followed a catastrophic collapse of civilisation as we know it in 2025. Let me get my criticisms out of the way first. The story has a slow pace and rather rambling plot, which is loosely underpinned by a series of related mysteries: the mystery of 1468, the mystery of Fairfax’s predecessor’s sudden death, the mystery of the apocalypse itself (discussion of which is punishable by a brutal and backward legal system), and the mystery of what happened in between the apocalypse and the narrative present. In contrast to what I’ve just written about Harris’ mastery of the twist in the tail, the resolution is also underwhelming, reminiscent of both Fatherland and Enigma (1995) albeit lacking their substance.

Where Harris shines, more so than in, for example, The Fear Index, is in his sketch of why civilisation collapsed and the inevitability of certain consequences of that collapse. The former is very much related to one of my own interests, the almost complete change to everyday life in the UK (and elsewhere) from 1995, when most people had no access to the internet, to 2015, when most of us spent nearly three and a half hours of each day glued to our phones, let alone on the internet. Smartphone enabled social media transformed almost everything we do and completed that transformation in less than twenty years – which is too much too soon, even if everything about the technology is beneficial (which it clearly isn’t). Harris is particularly concerned with the deeply problematic combination of the exponentially enhanced complexity of twenty-first century everydayness with the inherent vulnerability of coupled systems that rely on the coordination of a multiplicity of interconnected parts. While he does not dwell on the point, he makes an exceptionally chilling observation about the way in which the human species is currently setting itself up for the second sleep by outsourcing both its reasoning processes and social interactions to Big Tech. This is one of the rare cases where the transparency of the novel’s message, something along the lines of think about what the technology was designed for before you embrace it, does not undermine the pleasure of the medium in which it is delivered. Though far from Harris’ best novel, The Second Sleep is his best science fiction to date and definitely worth reading.