Books: A dystopian novel set among the Amish Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Published 10:25 p.m. ET July 29, 2017
In 1859, a solar storm turned night into day around the world while downing telegraph systems. One can only imagine the havoc such an event would cause now. David Williams has, in a debut novel set in the near future entitled “When the English Fall,” which is how one character describes the planes that come crashing down after such a storm scrambles the world’s electrical grid. She’s a 14-year-old Amish girl named Sadie. She and her fellow Amish designate anyone existing outside their close-knit communities as “English.” Williams’ novel explores what might happen to such a seemingly isolated Amish enclave once everything and everyone around it slouch toward the sort of dystopia we see in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which (Photo: Algonquin Books)
similarly contrasts a tiny beacon of hope and light — a man and his boy — in a darkening world.
Set in Pennsylvania Dutch country near Lancaster, things in Williams’ novel get dark in a hurry. Following the solar storm, computer records fail; credit and debit cards as well as bank machines therefore don’t work. Electricity goes and never comes back. There’s little gasoline; vehicles sometimes work and usually don’t. People grow hungry; looting and killing ensue. Having saved and stored for a rainy day, the well-stocked Amish become a plump and tempting target. We watch this gathering storm through the diary entries penned by Jacob, an Amish farmer and carpenter who is father to Sadie and a younger boy. While Jacob tells us he can be prideful and angry, he seems saintly. He feels guilty, for example, because the daily prayers he says for his daughter are eating into time he could spend praying for others; he worries that writing is overly narcissistic. All this goodness may be true to Amish life, but it’s not inherently dramatic. In trying to plumb what the Amish might feel as they’re victimized by the outside world’s violence, Williams runs into the same challenges confronting Jessica Dickey when writing “The Amish Project,” her play about the aftermath of the 2006 Nickel Mines massacre of Amish schoolgirls. In short, the Amish in this novel make their trials and tribulations look too easy. They rarely quarrel with one another, and none of them seems remotely tempted to respond to violence by fighting back. Because we see the catastrophe unfolding around them only from Jacob’s necessarily restricted point of view, we’re given too little sense of why life is so hard for everyone else. It doesn’t help that despite all the writing he does, Jacob is remarkably unreflective. His diary entries tend to be flatly expository, lending his account the feel of a chronicle rather than a genuine narrative. There isn’t a single character here who really comes alive. Even Sadie, an epileptic afflicted with startlingly accurate visions of the future, is ground down by a first-person narrative that cannot access her inner thoughts and, worse, doesn’t manifest sufficient curiosity regarding what they are. Sadie is a wasted narrative opportunity. Ditto an outsider named Mike, whose family will eventually hunker down on Jacob’s farm. Divorced, drinking and troubled before he shows up, Mike morphs into a model citizen. We don’t even get the sort of minor acting out exhibited by the emphatically nonAmish Harrison Ford in “Witness.” All of which takes us toward an unsatisfying and frankly illogical ending, defusing the escalating tension between cultures just when deteriorating outside events seemed to be building toward a bang. Instead we get a disappointing whimper. “When the world is wild and inconsistent, sometimes simple and consistent are a comfort,” Jacob writes at one point. He’s not wrong. Among the reasons dystopian fiction is currently so hot is its frequent promise of an idyllic, back-to-basics retreat from our overly complex world. But within the rural enclave featured in Williams’ novel, such simplicity has existed all along. This novel may feature planes falling from the sky, but nothing ever really moves. ‘When the English Fall’ By David Williams Algonquin Books, 256 pages, $24.95 Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2tNGeLH
