Customer Reviews

No Blade of Grass

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

NBOG has always been one of my favorite apcoalypse books, combining a fast moving plot with well defined characters and thought-provoking questions.
Like most post-apocalyptic novels, No Blade of Grass ostensibly focuses on the effects of, in this case, an ecological holocaust, on the lives of a small band of survivors in post-apocalypse Britain. The tale turns on what these survivors must do to reach "safety" on a small farm in a protected valley far from urban centers. In this, the book differs quite dramatically from much of the rest of this genre. Rather than dwelling on the problems faced when the world's population is decimated, NBOG poses the much more interesting question: What happens when most of the food supply is destroyed while most of the population remains? Christopher's answers will provoke, even anger you. But, whatever your response, the situations he poses must be taken seriously.

This is a book well worth reading together with Earth Abides or Lucifer's Hammer. Though both books take the more conventional route of killing off 99% of the world's population (the first by disease the second by a meteor), they deal with similar questions regarding civilization yet come to different answers. For my money, while NBOG's answers are the most distasteful, they are also the most realistic.

John Christopher writes some pretty gripping science fiction novels about alien invasions (The Tripod trilogy) catastrophic shifts in the earth's weather (The Long Winter) and terrifying tales of the savagery that humans revert to when civilization breaks down (A Wrinkle In The Skin)-- potent stuff indeed. His books share with JG BALLARD a fascination for post-apocalyptic settings but are really psychological character studies about how people change to fit their environments. This book is perhaps Christopher at his starkest and most frightening. A man simply tries to take his family safely out of London to his brother's farm in the North after a genetically engineered bio-weapon gets out of control and wipes out the world's food supply, causing anarchy and chaos to erupt all over the globe.It is interesting to note that on the page the protagonist's actions and "him or me" ethos seem to make much more sense than they do in Cornel Wilde's gonzo 1970 film adaptaion, where the main character comes off as much more trigger-happy and casually lethal & ruthless than in the novel; one might say its only a matter of degree once the civilized world has crumbled but that doesn't make it any more palatable. Sounds like a bad review, doesn't it? On the contrary, today almost all of John Christopher's nightmare scenarios seem only a few CNN headlines away...and thus more compelling than ever.

Most apocalyptic novels are marked by spectacular explosions, loathesome invaders, or the like. This one is not. Instead, in a very believable scenario, a rice virus develops in China, and the Chinese government tries to keep it secret. However, when the great famine develops, the UN comes up with an isotope that stops it. But the cure is worse than the disease, for this allows an all encompassing grass virus to come out of hiding.

What follows is a civilization ending virus that kills all grasses, including all food grains. So, in one swoop, livestock and grain are gone. The Eastern hemisphere descends into famine and cannibalism. In England, the site of the story, the government decides to use H-Bombs on the cities to alleviate the famine. All well and good, and frighteningly believable.

But what isn't at all credible, and what detracts from the book is the tale of a few people who go into a small, secluded English valley to live on potatoes and root crops. Except for a brief foray, the group faces no meaningful attack, and the book ends with the Western Hemisphere intact, and the valley's few survivors planning to build new cities. The ending is a sop to the desire to give some hope where none would exist. Personally, I much prefer George Stewart's much more honest approach in "Earth Abides."

It's been years since I read "No Blade of Grass." It's a story that should not go out of print, but has. It has the same haunting quality as "On The Beach," or "Alas Babylon." They depicted a world following a nuclear war, with differing results. This story uses a grass blight to achieve basically the same result, a world-wide disaster that presages the end of civilization as we know it.

The story itself takes place in England, and portrays the events following the destruction of all grass species by disease, including grains, with the resultant loss of grazing animals and looming human starvation.

The main story is the human reactions that follow--how the characters cope with the situation, and how they react and are changed by the anarchy that results. The story promotes thought about how much we rely on external controls in our daily life, and the necessity of individual internal control in our everyday struggle for existence, especially in such dramatic life-threatening situations.

A good book, if you can find a copy.

Joseph Pierre

No Blade of Grass is even more timely today than when it was written. The plotline is familiar. It shows a very dark view of ordinary people trying to cope with the end of the world. That is well-done but it is the fact that the collapse of civilization is not from nuclear war or such but from a simple virus. The virus kills all members of the grass family. When you consider how many major food crops would be affected and then the domino effect of the loss of feed for animals, you are reminded of how truly vulnerable life on earth is and how easily the balance can be upset. I don't know if John Christopher was being prophetic or simply wanted a different sort of disaster for background, but with today's concerns about viruses, the book is chillingly real.

A chilling study of the start of a new Dark Ages, written in a John Wyndham style. John Christopher's excellent novel charts the fall of the human race into barbarism after a disease wipes out all grass crops. Powerful and unfortunately all too believable. Track down this book and read - it will haunt you for ages after.

The novel is as brilliant as ever and shares an important place in speculative fiction despite its frequent imitators. This is the book that defined Christopher's reputation for creating believable characters and placing them in precarious situations to the pleasure of the reading public. FIND THIS NOVEL and set it alongside the Tripod Trilogy. You won't find that damned movie, this I can tell you.

No Blade of Grass is story of an agricultural experiment gone totally awry. It attacks all grain like produce(oats, wheat, alphalfa, etc)and kills them without mercy. When the worlds best can't stop it and panic across the world becomes the norm. The story ends up following a group of people who join together to reach a farm in Ireland that grows potatoes, one of the crops not affected by the grass killer. I highly recomend this story for anyone who likes good scifi and human conflict tales. I read this book when I was freshman in high school at the behest of my father. And though I resisted at first I grew to like this book as I contiued to read it. This is a book no personal library should be without,

I found this book at the library. I had heard of it. My father told me it was published as a serialized novel in the Saturday Evening Post when he was a teenager, which caused a lot of controversy. Many people found the novel upsetting. Though somewhat tame by today's standards it is still a potent look at civilization crumbling after a plague wipes out all grass, wheat, oats, and other plants destroying most of the world's food supply. It is great in showing how quickly civilized people very well could resort to violence once civilization no longer exists. The characters and well drawn and intriguing, especially the gun expert. I recommend it.

This is now out of print: cheap paperback editions from the 60's are now selling for forty or fifty bucks. Most of John Christopher's stuff (actual name: Samuel Youd) is for pre-teens, but this novel is for adults -- though it is a short one.

This book manages to be both gripping and depressing, but it's not without its problems:

1. It seems to take forever to get started.

2. I would say that characterization in this novel is a minus. Christopher throws too many characters at you too fast. Since he doesn't bother to distinguish them much, it's a bit hard to tell them apart until the middle of the novel. But once the middle of the novel hits, even more come along.

The one thing I liked about this novel was that our heroes, in an attempt to survive, resort to murdering innocent people using an "either us or them" philosophy. Since you don't see that very often in the post-Apocalyptic genre, I would recommend it in that respect.