NIGHTMARE ABOUT THE FUTURE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20065, 23 March 1935, Page 12

NIGHTMARE ABOUT THE FUTURE

THEME OF SENSATIONAL NOVEL DESCRIBED AS GRIM WARNING TO HUMANITY One of the most outstanding novels to come off the English presses in February was James O’Neill’s “Land under England,” with a preface by “A.E.” published by Gollancz. Fantastic Plot This is at once a solid and a sensational novel—a novel, too, that will remain in the memory long after one has finished reading it. In plot it is as fantastic as “Alice in Wonderland”; in spirit it is as rational as Mill on Liberty. It might be described as a mixture of a Jules Verne romance and a passionately earnest tract for the times. “A.E.” in his preface observes that Mr O’Neill has “elevated the thriller into literature,” and certainly Mr O'Neill never forgets that his first business here as a story-teller is to thrill us. His thrills, however, depend not merely upon the terrifying physical adventures of his hero in the underground world, but on our feeling of horror at the thought that the creatures he finds there—expressionless creatures that once were men—may be the humanity of the future, if the civilised world deliberately submits itself to political dictatorship. Down Among the Dead Men The hero of the story is a young man whose soldier father has disappeared mysteriously, as a number of his ancestors had done, in the neighbourhood of the Roman wall. There were legends of the existence of a trap-door in the wall, which, if it were discovered, might reveal the mystery of the strange disappearances, and Tony Julian, searching for it one day, accidentally falls through it into an abyss.

Mr O’Neill’s copious imagination keeps his readers not only interested but excited as Julian descends through the infernal landscape, where life ultimately shows itself in ghastly forms, animal and vegetable. This part of the story is supremely well told, and Mr O’Neill’s matter-of-fact way of describing an utterly impossible world makes it easy for the imagination to believe that it is all true. This, however, is merely a prelude to the account of Tony’s arrival among the human dwellers in this subterranean territory, and of his adventures as he searches among their mindless faces for his lost father.

The inhabitants of this negatively happy hell are the descendants of the Romans who once lived in England, and they have evolved the most highly disciplined civilisation that has ever been imagined, even in modern Europe.

The individual mind and individual emotions have ceased to exist. The citizen lives only in the life of the community, like an ant. He has as little personality of his own as a wheel in a machine. These dead living men neither think nor speak. They merely carry out the will of their dictatorial superiors, who have emptied them of •will-power and substituted their own. Men Like Robots The most terrifying experiences of Tony occur when the High Ones (who communicate only by means of thought transference) attempt to “absorb” him as the other Robots have been “absorbed”—to dominate and destroy his will—and when at last he discovers his father, now an unrebellious slave like the rest. The first of the High Ones, who explained to Tony the beauty of this slave civilisation, must be admitted to be as plausible in his reasoning as the Inquisitor in “St. Joan.” “And these automatons,” I interrupted in amazement, “these poor creatures whom you have robbed of their minds—they are happy?” “They do not need their minds for their work,” came the answer. “Little minds such as theirs could be of no use to them, any more than their little emotions. These could only do them harm. We have taken all the little minds and little emotions and we have pooled these into one deep emotion—a love for the common good of all—so that they have more joy even than I have who have had to keep my mind.” Everything that is done by the High Ones is done in order to save the life of the people from “meaninglessness and despair and death.” Saving The Soul Again and again the superiority of enslavement to freedom is insisted upon: “The significance of even the finest individual is slight, that of the poorer individuals slighter still, compared to the significance of the people as a whole. We could not allow the continued existence of our people to be jeopardised and destroyed for the sake of the petty significance of individuals, each trying to express his own importance, as our fathers did.” The story, however, never becomes lost in argument. The reader never ceases to be apprehensive about the fate of a human being in danger of losing his soul and, after the death of his father, struggling to return amid terrifying adventures to the green surface of the earth. “Land Under England” is a nightmare of the future, though not assuredly a prophecy. It is the story of the death in life that would be the logical consequence of dictatorship. Instead of closing it with the words “The End,” Mr O’Neill might justifiably have printed in large letters on the last page, the sentence: “You have been warned!”