If the First Apocalypse Doesn’t Get You, the Second One Will
The Moon Was the Easy Part: Reviewing R.C. Sherriff’s Imaginative Classic ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’
A secret curdles inside Edgar Hopkins’s brain. Only he and a privileged few know the truth: In seven months’ time, the moon will strike the earth.
Hopkins is a semi-retired, mid-life man in rural England who preens when showing his prize-winning poultry. He also happens to be an amateur astronomer with a particular interest in the moon. As such, he belongs to the British Lunar Society, which meets every month in London to discuss various aspects of lunar discovery and lore before breaking for biscuits and coffee.
But everything steady and normal in Hopkins’s life screeches to a halt at one of these monthly confabs. The moon, the president of the society informs his audience, has shaken loose from its orbit and is now hurtling toward Earth. The two will collide.
At first, mum’s the word. Hopkins and those gathered, along with select others in positions of power around the world, are sworn to secrecy. From the perspective of the naked eye, the moon has barely budged toward the earth. The average person would never suspect the doom in store. And the various governments of the world determine mass ignorance is ideal, all things considered; they’ll use the time to prepare. Until the public can see the danger for themselves, Hopkins must keep quiet, carrying the terrible secret alone.
He eventually writes the whole thing down—an account he composes after the impact and secures in a capsule, later discovered by people sifting through the aftermath to explain what happened. Hence R.C. Sherriff’s title, The Hopkins Manuscript.
Hollywood Sherriff
Sherriff joined the British military in 1915 and fought in France and Belgium during the First World War. He was injured in 1917 and found his way back to England where, after the war, he began adjusting insurance claims for the next decade. Good times. Meanwhile, he also began writing plays.
He wrote seven in the 1920s, culminating in 1928 with one drawn from his wartime letters. Journey’s End became a sensation on the stage. In 1929 it debuted on Broadway, and Sherriff spun it into a film and a novel the following year. Hollywood took note and flew him out to Southern California in 1932 to work as a screenwriter, starting with an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man.
Sherriff kept writing plays, but none had the success of Journey’s End. While his drama career fizzled, the movies ignited. From 1932 through 1939, Sherriff plied his pen on some nine films, among them The Four Feathers and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which earned him an Oscar nomination. He also turned his attention to novels.
After the novelization of Journey’s End, which he adapted with the help of a cowriter, he wrote The Fortnight in September in 1931 and followed it with Greengates in 1936, a lightly satiric domestic novel about a mid-life crisis in the suburbs. But by then, the cancer in Germany was metastasizing, and Sherriff turned his talents to darker fare.
How do people cope when the world ends?
Disaster Strikes
As part of its efforts to hide the impending disaster, the British government mobilizes the country under the auspices of strengthening its defenses in case of war. It tasks the citizenry with building bomb shelters all over the country—without telling them the awful truth: those reinforced holes in the ground are actually moon shelters. Not that they’d do much good in the event of a direct hit, but the work keeps people busy.
Eventually, the moon looms too large to ignore, and the governments of the world tell the public what’s coming. For the most part, the people rally and bend to the hard work of preparation. From this infectious optimism, Hopkins, previously soured by his secret, takes courage and something resembling hope. These are some of the more buoyant passages in the book.
In many ways, Hopkins makes for an unsympathetic character, especially at the beginning. He whines. He’s mewling and self-pitying. He tends to see the worst in people and confesses his annoying faults for posterity to read. But he turns. Formerly standoffish about his fellow villagers, Hopkins heartily joins the work and forms close friendships. He grows close to his neighbors, the young-adult brother and sister, Robin and Pat—especially after the moon strikes.
In the aftermath of a natural disaster, people come together and rebuild. While most of Hopkins’s neighbors die—the shelter proved susceptible to flooding—a handful who stayed above ground, our protagonist among them, along with Pat and Robin, band together, form a little community, and begin hunting and farming. They start trading with a nearby village. A massive gulf separates the survivors from the old world—lost advancement, lost technology and wealth—but the normal rhythms of life resume.
Sherriff published The Hopkins Manuscript in 1939, so some of the science behind the event doesn’t ring true. But as an imaginative piece of fiction, it’s wonderful and also at times painfully perceptive. The people on the ground rebound from the first apocalypse. It’s the second they have to worry about more.
The Moon Was the Easy Part
The moon, Sherriff imagines, is hollow. When it lands directly in the Atlantic, it collapses like an egg and the flattened mass spreads across the sea, forming a new continent. And since it also turns out to hold a tremendous quantity of precious resources—fossil fuels and rare metals among them—the powers of Europe, America, and Canada scurry to carve it up.
A plan for an orderly division of the resources quickly falls apart. The British, now landlocked, argue for a corridor to reach the ocean so they can keep access to their empire. The Europeans block it, since the corridor would impede their access to the moon. And so commences the second and more dangerous apocalypse: the political one.
This is, I think, the most interesting and perceptive aspect of the story. Its message, finally, is that misguided political power is far more dangerous than any environmental disaster we might suffer. We don’t need to fear celestial bodies crashing into the earth nearly as much as the humans scrambling across its surface, hungry for gain and armed with the weapons of the state.
Sherriff avoids outright cynicism. He offers several positive portraits of government officials working well and efficiently to organize and rebuild. But political opportunists and populists seize power and precipitate the final catastrophe.
I’ll resist giving away the ending and how the last collapse materializes. I’ll say only the narrative harmonizes with the present in disconcerting ways. Sherriff was playing with what he saw emerging in Germany. But his portrayal of the rise of authoritarianism—of populists who manipulate the public in the name of some domestic, national right while simultaneously exposing it to external threats no one ever saw coming—is sobering.
Special thanks to Kat Rosenfield for pointing me to this mid-century gem. And thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below, restack, and share it with your friends (especially if they love great post-apocalyptic fiction).
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Somehow brings to mind When the Wind Blows, which affected us all so much in the '80s. Doing something for the sake of doing something, even when that something is utterly preposterous.
I am so happy you wrote this post. It reminded me how much I liked this book, when I had to put it down half way through, a few years ago. I am going to go finish it. Thank you.