When the English Fall

A solar storm has knocked out much of the world's electronic/electrical systems only fragments of that world, so unthinkingly familiar, survives. Mobile phones fall silent, your credit card is useless and indeed redundant as your bank account, nesting in the 'Cloud', has disappeared! Just in time delivery means that nothing is stocked where it is needed, the cities and their citizens, go hungry and slowly, steadily citizenship, itself, crumbles.

Meanwhile, though not wholly unaffected, even they have made compromises with modernity, the Amish and their life continues to unfold. It is late summer, moving into autumn, there is harvesting to be done and the subsequent milling, canning, preserving. All of this shot through with scenes of community help, community gossip and, most importantly, for this ancient Anabaptist group, worship and prayer.

But even though they have 'separated' themselves, no one in the world is truly separate and the world's chaos closes in; and, the community must find ways to respond, to suffer and to survive.

David Williams' "When the English fall" is a post-apocalyptic novel woven around this scenario. It takes the form of a journal, kept by Jacob, an Amish farmer, who lives with his wife and two children, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, heart of the original Amish settlement in the U.S..

In his simple, reflective, measured prose the events slowly unfold until most of the community decide that to survive, without sheltering under their neighbours' defensive violence, they must go west to their newer fellow communities, where land is more plentiful and cities, with their emptying, threatening, desperate outflows of people, less numerous.

It beautifully captures the dilemmas of a community, wedded to non-violence, in a darkening age and, of course, uses the scenario to quietly question our growing 'connectivity' and whether it genuinely builds the resilience of community that we need.

It, also, interestingly weaves into the narrative hints of a gathering challenge, not as immediately catastrophic as a solar storm, but nevertheless already profoundly dislocating, namely climate change. It is cunning of the author to unobtrusively slip it into a farmer's journal recognising that it simply now, sadly, belongs there. Mr Trump in his golden tower might not believe in it but it is, as study after study shows, what every farmer now knows.

All of this is rooted in a narrative saturated with the community's Christian faith, a faith that, in the past, and now again, was and is much tested. A faith that indicates that though the world is a divine gift, our collective and individual handling of that gift leaves much to be desired. A handling that requires more reverence and humility than we have afforded it.

This mystery at the heart of things is most readily shown through Sadi, Jacob's daughter. She is 'fey'. She foresees. Growing up this is seeing simple things such as a forthcoming accident to a friend but as the storm approaches, she foresees the oncoming crisis, interpreted through her lights. Her promptings, when acknowledged, help the community take its next step but, equally, on their own can only ever be one among many sources of guidance. Even the 'magical' must take its place amongst an ordering of the world that is meant to serve the witness of community to its life and faith.

Along the way, you gain vivid insight into the ways of a living community and some sharp, if compassionate, asides on some of our current cultural predicaments; not least, the strange disconnecting angriness one finds on social media.

It is a dark novel - but with significant indicators to where light might lie: in faith, in resilience, in reconnecting with a gifted natural world, in scrutinising our default to violence; and, most simply, in preparation, nothing is as complacent as complacency!