The Death of Grass

I remember reading this as a teenager and liking it a lot. But I don’t think I saw it as anything more than a, slightly grim, adventure story. A virus spreads around the world, killing all forms of grass. Crops die. Famines follow. Society breaks down. As our main characters set out on a trek north, to a valley that will offer them protection, it’s only hours before they have to start killing to survive.

That’s what grabbed the teenage me: the relentless narrative and the ‘action’. Something is always happening. But reading it decades later, as an adult, what struck me was the almost clinical precision with which John Christopher charts the moral breakdown of the group. It’s not enough for them just to escape to a safe haven; to do so they have to be prepared to kill and – what’s really chilling – kill innocent strangers.

Nothing is glamourized. There are no exciting chases or shoot-outs. There are no murderous villains whose deaths the reader can celebrate. Instead what we’re confronted with is a world in which conventional, civilised, morality has to disappear if anyone is to survive.

Reading The Death of Grass, I thought about Lucifer’s Hammer, another post-apocalypse story. As exciting and readable as it is – and I’ve read and enjoyed it three times – it’s very much a ‘cosy’ disaster story. The survivors are good and decent and only fight to protect what’s theirs. The people who try to take it from them are all bad and corrupt and end up dead after a massive – exciting – battle. Civilised order is restored.

There’s an order restored at the end of The Death of Grass. But what makes it so unsettlingly memorable is the author’s acknowledgement of the price that has to be paid for that order. And his refusal to let the reader off the hook and just enjoy a good adventure story. 

Very definitely a modern classic.