by Alwyn Turner
But while the central characters remain strong, there is in the novel no significant development, despite the extra space available. As a television writer, and as a devotee in childhood of the thriller genre, Nation remains wedded to action and dialogue, allowing little scope for interior depictions of his characters; we seldom know what they think, only what they express in words to others. Perhaps the one exception is Greg, whose reluctance to commit himself is more convincing on the page, and who does emerge as a more believable figure. His detachment, his sense of relief at having unwanted responsibilities lifted from his shoulders by the plague, is more thoroughly fleshed out, but again this tends to be through his own words, with even the smallest changes resonating. ‘I was wrong, Jeannie,’ he says to the dead body of his wife, who has perished in the epidemic. ‘I thought you were the sort of bitch who would survive just to spite me.’ The word ‘bitch’ was not in the television script and adds considerable weight to his comments, even though it remains an unlikely thought to articulate aloud to a corpse.
It is not a wholly successful book. Too episodic, too reliant on dialogue, it largely confirms Nation’s own assessment: ‘I don’t come easily to prose, I don’t find prose an easy form to write in.’ Even in the moments when the writing almost breaks free from its origins to achieve its own identity, there are still traces of the staccato rhythms of a television script:
Some roads had almost vanished, and passage along many was all but impossible. Weeds and saplings and briar buried the land and what stood on it. Only the small pockets of cultivated ground around the communities remained. Like islands in a rising green sea. The survivors found the limits of their worlds at the edges of their small holdings. They ate, and they worked. And they worked to eat. The demands of maintaining that cycle allowed them little else.
Even so, there are good things about the book. The tone throughout is low-key and unsensational, despite the much more pessimistic – or, one might argue, realistic – narrative. Vic Thatcher, left abandoned in the quarry with his legs crushed, dies alone, rather than being found alive months later, while Abby carries out euthanasia on a member of the community with terminal cancer, and other survivors resort to cannibalism: ‘When there was nothing left, some conquered their disgust at eating human flesh and lived on.’ Most shocking of all, Jimmy Garland, whose war with Knox is recounted in the novel (though at a different point in the timeline) doesn’t live long enough to ride in to whisk Abby away, but instead dies of a wound that turns gangrenous. In a way of which Terence Dudley would probably have approved, his death isn’t even depicted directly, but only mentioned in passing by Abby later on. Meanwhile the threat posed by Arthur Wormley’s National Unity Force looms larger than it did on television; the community has to learn to live with the ever-present risk of attack.
This grim note, apart from being closer to Nation’s original concept, is also indicative of a general attempt to make the material more adult, in contrast to the television version, which had been criticised by some as juvenile. (‘It goes down very well indeed with children,’ noted Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian.) That hadn’t been Nation’s intention, but he had been restricted by the pre-watershed scheduling and by conventions over which he had no control. Most absurdly, the BBC had refused to allow a shot of Abby and Jimmy Garland in bed together, since they weren’t married, reflecting a moralistic attitude that permeated British broadcasting at the time; in 1977 the ITV sitcom Robin’s Nest had to get special dispensation from the Independent Broadcasting Authority to show an unmarried couple living together. It was perhaps in retaliation that the novel shows Abby, alone in her bed, masturbating to the image of Garland, though it’s not a very convincing passage. Survivors was already Nation’s first serious work to attempt a love interest; venturing into sex scenes was perhaps a step too far.
There is, however, one major exception to the harsh tone, a genuine lightening of the original. Clive Exton’s episode ‘Law and Order’ had depicted the community celebrating May Day with a party, after which the former tramp Tom Price rapes and murders one of the women while he’s drunk. He then frames a simple-minded resident, and the rest of the community try the man in an ad hoc court, find him guilty and execute him, before some of them discover their mistake. It’s a shocking development, coming completely out of the blue and seemingly out of character, and Nation subsequently provided Price with an element of redemption, having him die a heroic death in ‘The Future Hour’. In the novel, without benefit of Exton’s plot, there is no rape, no murder and no need for self-sacrifice. Instead Nation lets Price live on and takes a much more generous view of the character. Far from being a killer, Price is here simply a roguish Welsh fantasist, ‘a man to whom lies came more easily than truth’. He’s always keen to seek refuge in fiction, so that when he reveals his knack for snaring rabbits and wins the praise of the others, he can’t help but spin yarns about having been the head gamekeeper to Lord Glamorgan, with twenty men working under him. And when the group decide to arm themselves, he begins to reminisce ‘about his past campaigns, his heroism and the medals that recognised it’. He remains an outsider in the group, but he is at least tolerated and accepted.
Nation was later to explain that Price was based on a man he knew in his local village, a part-time poacher who did some casual cash-in-hand work, who he thought would find a niche, however catastrophic the situation: ‘this guy had scrounged around, he’d done an odd job here, an odd job there, he’d steal something, and he was a survivor right from the beginning.’ But there were also surely memories of Nation’s own Welsh childhood, his preference for a good tale over prosaic reality, almost as though he were imagining an alternative reality for himself in which he never became successful, never discovered a legitimate outlet for his storytelling. As Price picks up a flash car in the immediate aftermath of the plague, he imagines the response it would have elicited from his old acquaintances. ‘Damn! Look at that! There’s old Pricey in a bloody Rolls-Royce!’ he says aloud with, we are told, ‘his Welsh ancestry strong in his voice’.
The biggest change made in the novel, however, lies in the ending. Five years on from the advent of the plague, Abby has come to the conclusion that the British climate simply isn’t amenable to the level of subsistence farming required, let alone to building something more durable. So she proposes to the group that they relocate: ‘I want to cross into Europe and move down to the Mediterranean. Probably Italy.’ It’s an argument whose foundations had been laid by Greg some time earlier: ‘In this country we have only about six months when the ground is workable. In that time we have to grow enough to eat day by day, enough to set aside for a six-month winter. Provide winter feeding for our stock. Collect fuel. There’s no way it can be done.’ However daunting the prospect of such a move, the alternative of remaining, with the ever-present danger from Wormley’s NUF, proves too much for the survivors and, reluctantly, they agree to the undertaking. And so the community uproots itself and begins the long trek to the south coast, where they hope to find the means to cross to France.
There, just outside Dover, with most of the group having already sailed, Abby finally comes face-to-face with her long-lost son Peter, for whom she has spent so much time searching in the wake of the outbreak. And, before he realises who she is, he shoots her dead.
If it’s a somewhat melodramatic conclusion to the novel, as fanciful in its way as Garland’s appearance on a white charger, it is at least in tune with the sense of hopelessness and the haphazard violence that has punctuated the whole story. Abby’s journey began when she woke up from her bout of the disease to find her husband dead (a particularly severe shock in the screen version, since it meant the loss of the ever-likeable Peter Bowles), and death has stalked her ever since, an unpredictable interruption to life. Nation’s artistic vision was becoming increasingly dark, although – given his chosen medium of populist television – the bleakness manifests itself in a slightly different manner to that of much contemporary fiction
.
There weren’t, for example, the moral ambiguities and confusions of John le Carré’s novels, where the well-intentioned find themselves corrupted by the actions demanded of them. Rather Nation’s work still presents an essentially black-and-white world where there is little confusion about who are the good guys and who the villains, even if the baddies are more subtly written than before. This is not a post-apocalyptic world in which society and community collapse altogether – as in Barry Hines’s television drama Threads (1984), where even language falls apart in the aftermath of a nuclear attack – for there is still an optimism about humanity and morality. But there is also an abandonment of any suggestion that virtue might bring its own reward. The senseless brutality and bloodshed were almost reminiscent of the new generation of horror writers led by James Herbert, author of the best-selling The Rats (1974), The Fog (1975) and The Survivor (1976), except that in Herbert’s novels it is always clear who the victims are going to be; characters appear, have their life histories sketched in and are dispatched within the space of a few pages. With Nation there is no such certainty who will survive. A hero is as likely to die suddenly as a villain, and Abby Grant’s death, just at the moment of escape to a better future, just when she has discovered that her son has survived against all the odds, is the most startling manifestation of the theme.
Rather less convincing is the way in which the departure for Europe feels as though it’s tagged on to the end. The whole episode is covered in barely thirty pages, and one can’t help thinking that it would have made for a more coherent narrative if the group had embarked upon the project earlier, if the trek towards sunnier climes had been explored at greater length. Or, indeed, if they had got further than merely crossing the Channel, which was, Nation explained in later interviews, how he’d wished the story to develop. ‘Really what I wanted was to have them go back to the valley of the Indus. They have to go across the English Channel to France, and then find some way across the Mediterranean, and this was on a gigantic scale which we could never do on television.’
He was right, of course, that it was entirely impractical for a television drama, but he spoke too about writing ‘the novel of the length I wanted to do’. And this certainly was within his control, though not perhaps within his powers, for a book on the epic scale he was suggesting was an undertaking of a very different nature to anything he’d ever written. What did emerge was a hybrid that didn’t convince as a novel in its own right, while being too far removed from the television storyline to satisfy many viewers. By sticking too closely for too long to the scripts he had already written, by staying with the objectivity of television rather than the subjectivity of prose fiction, Nation sacrificed the integrity of a novel that could have stood alone.
The book was published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (who were to have published The Incredible Robert Baldick) and in paperback by Futura, and sold well enough to merit a sequel, particularly in light of the television series being commissioned for a third season. Survivors: Genesis of a Hero emerged in 1977, though it had no involvement from Nation himself, and was written instead by John Eyers. Unable to use the continuing story from television, he starts at the point where Nation’s book left off, on the beach near Dover where Peter Grant has just shot his mother. The narrative then follows Peter as he rises through the ranks of the National Unity Force, before he falls foul of court politics and defects to a rival society in Wales. It’s an entertaining romp through post-industrial barbarism, but has nothing to do with the television series or with Nation’s conception. (Only one other book ever appeared under the name of John Eyers, a spin-off from the ITV series Special Branch titled In at the Kill, published in 1976, and it is generally accepted that it was a pseudonym.)
Nation’s awareness of his own limitations when it came to writing prose, however, needs to be balanced by the success of the only other novel he wrote. Rebecca’s World, published in his annus mirabilis of 1975 – when ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and the first season of Survivors also made their appearance – was a children’s book, named for his daughter, to whom, he announced, he was assigning all the royalties. It’s the tale of a small girl named Rebecca, who is accidentally transported via a transmitter beam to another planet, rather in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling down a rabbit-hole. The world on which she finds herself has four suns and a wide variety of wildlife, including Silkies (bat-like creatures that spin silk as they fly), Swardlewardles (who breathe out laughing gas to render their prey helpless) and Splinter Birds (who remove splinters from people). Sadly, however, there is little now for the latter to do, for this is a world in which all the trees have been chopped down in order to feed the vast furnaces making the glass out of which the buildings, and most other things besides, are constructed. This has had unfortunate consequences for the population, since it turns out that it was only the presence of the trees that kept at bay a tribe of evil, shapeless monsters called GHOSTS (the capitalisation is Nation’s own). Without the trees the GHOSTS can now prey on the people at will.
Rebecca soon acquires three companions: a deeply depressed man named Grisby, who has a Hancock-like obsession with his feet (they are, he insists, ‘the sorest pair of throbbers in the entire history of feet’), an unemployed spy named Kovak, who believes he’s a master of disguise, though he always remains instantly recognisable, and a would-be superhero named Captain ‘K’, whose only power comes from his possession of the last stick of wood on the planet that isn’t owned by the all-powerful Mr Glister. It was the Glister family who discovered how to make glass and who now control the whole planet. When the magical power of the trees became apparent, the Glisters had the last remaining specimens chopped down and the wood made into planks, from which were constructed GHOST shelters. Now, whenever the GHOSTS attack, the populace swarm into these shelters to hide, for which privilege they are charged by the grasping and wicked Mr Glister. ‘Nature has endowed me with all the finest qualities a man can have,’ he brags. ‘I am a splendid liar, a marvellous cheat and a magnificent bully. I have made myself rich by being vicious and cruel.’ There is, however, one small ray of hope. A map exists showing the location of one last tree, hidden deep in the Forbidden Lands, guarded by GHOSTS and accessible only by passing through a series of challenges and trials. And so Rebecca and her three new friends set out in the hope of saving the world.
Apart from the echoes of the Alice stories, there are also nods to The Wizard of Oz – a small girl and her three ill-assorted companions set off on a quest, albeit from a glass city rather than to an emerald one – and there is even a hint of the Daleks when the GHOSTS, believing that they have destroyed the last remaining tree, become hysterical in their demands that the people bow down before them. ‘We are the victors!’ they shriek. ‘The supreme power of this planet!’ And, of course, the theme of a world in which technology has triumphed over nature to the detriment of the inhabitants parallels much of Nation’s thinking in Survivors.
The structure too is recognisably Nation. Ever since ‘The Daleks’, he had regularly used the device of his hero arriving on a planet in the midst of a story and having another character bring him up to speed on the history of the place. Even Survivors had started with the epidemic in full sway, with much of the background sketched in after the fact. The same is true here, as Rebecca’s new friends fill her in on how they got to this parlous position. Similarly the perils and predicaments that they face, as well as the plans they concoct to escape, are characteristic of his work, though, as so often, it is the villain who commands centre stage. Glister is a wonderfully evil creation, a monstrously caricatured capitalist who becomes self-indulgently maudlin when he thinks about the poor. ‘Call me silly and sentimental if you will,’ he tells Rebecca with a sob in his voice, ‘but one day I hope that everybody in this world will be penniless, hungry and in rags. With poverty on that scale I could love them all.’
The book was well received – ‘a pleasant, entertaining and imaginati
ve tale for 8 to 12s’, thought the Daily Express – and in April 1976 it featured on the children’s story-telling series Jackanory on BBC television, read in five fifteen-minute episodes by Bernard Cribbins, who had a decade earlier battled the Daleks in the second Peter Cushing movie. It ran to more than a dozen printings and attracted a great many enthusiastic readers, both among children and teachers, the latter finding that it lent itself admirably to being read aloud to a class. Perhaps it was appropriate that the best prose writing of a man who worked almost exclusively in television was more suited to oral delivery than it was to solitary reading. ‘I’d been reading children’s stories to my daughter and to my son, and I get really very bored with some of them,’ he explained. ‘And I wanted a book that was going to please the adult who read aloud and please the child who was listening to it.’ In common with much of Nation’s work, it continued to find new audiences after his death, being released in 2010 as an audio CD, read by Paul Darrow, while early editions became highly sought after collectors’ items, partly in tribute to the beautiful illustrations by Larry Learmouth.
