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 2020 Hindsight by Jock Howson
466 pages, trade paperback. ISBN 0 9536141 07
€ 9.95 plus postage from J. Howson, Trakael Strand, Goat's Path, Bantry, County Cork, Ireland
reviewed by Roelof Goudriaan
Original appearance: Albedo one issue 21, May 2000
2020: Hindsight are the memoires of a survivor of the Millennium Crash. Getting caught in one of the fights where people try to get to the depleting stocks of the supermarkets ("the Great Tesco Food Fight"), the narrator tells the ordeals of a small desperate community struggling to survive in the barbarism into which England is rapidly falling.
Told blow by blow, the book is sometimes weighed down by the amount of detail. But the tale continues to hold reader interest by an efficient use of flashbacks and by good writing. Witness the opening sentence: "The guitarist turned out to be quite good, so we decided not to eat him." (Yes, desperation has already turned this community into a cannibalistic one).
I could have done without quite as much explanation of how it came to be: a crash of the worldwide phone system, causing the collapse of almost any other system known to man - information and distribution systems, banks and cash dispensers, you name it. But the description of the events leading to and especially the aftermath of the Crash are compelling. The choice of a crippled man as first person narrator is actually the right one for the effect the author wants to achieve. The crippled's confinement creates the eye for detail in a natural manner; and the handicapped's pitiful circumstances illustrate the rapid downfall of society vividly. The narrator's descriptions of how he crawls around, and his feelings of degradation and self-pity crawling around like that, are among the most probing of the book. Even the gallows humour displayed in the book fits with the kind of person the narrator is made to be.
The attention paid to the book's structure and voice shows through in the book's packaging, which helps to create the illusion of having a 21st century memoires in your hands. Everything fits, everything is consistent. The care that went into this novel makes 2020: Hindsight a remarkable book.
This is your chance to pick up a piece of prime Irish Science Fiction priced at less than half of what a trade paperback would normally cost you.
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