“Journey’s End” was a surprise hit. The first short run was directed by James Whale and featured a young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope, after which the production changed theater and lead; The play’s success allowed Sherriff to move into a fine mansion with his mother. (His biographer, Roland Wales, says he never seems to have had a romantic relationship with anyone.) In 1931, he published “The Fortnight in September,” a near-perfect comic about a family trip to the coast, and was published two years later by Whale to write the script for Universal Pictures’ adaptation of “The Invisible Man,” by HG Wells. It was Sherriff’s first professional exposure to science fiction, and a few years later he embarked on an even more ambitious attempt at the genre as the world was about to repeat the mistakes of the Great War.
“The Hopkins Manuscript” opens with a foreword from the Imperial Research Press of Addis Ababa, stating that the text that follows was discovered in a thermos flask “in the ruins of Notting Hill.” More than 800 years have passed since an unspecified catastrophe brought about the end of Western civilization, and all the records of Britain since the time of Julius Caesar have been lost, save for some stray fragments, such as a tablet commemorating the inauguration of a public swimming paradise. swimming pool in North London. Scholars of ancient history, the preface reads, hoped the manuscript would shed light on England’s last days, but they were disappointed to find nothing but the will of “a man of such unquenchable self-esteem and a limited view that his story becomes almost worthless. to the scientist and historian.”
At the beginning of the story, the reader has little reason to question this statement. Edgar Hopkins is a retired schoolmaster in his early fifties who lives on an estate near the village of Beadle where he raises chickens for poultry shows. An associate member of the British Lunar Society, he is one of the first to hear the news that the Moon is expected to collide with Earth in just under seven months. Science of the impending disaster is deliberately left vague – the moon’s departure from its usual orbit is attributed to “a gigantic force” – and Hopkins can’t believe that something really bad will actually happen: “My vanity convinced me that God would never allow the world to end until I was personally done with it.
The premise might remind some movie buffs of Roland Emmerich’s recent “Moonfall,” which featured the reassuring sight of Halle Berry beating a tsunami in a space shuttle, but Sherriff has very different intentions. Like Kazuo Ishiguro, a noted admirer, Sherriff is a master at framing a story from the narrow point of view of the narrator, and the novel would still be hugely readable – and funny – if it were nothing more than an exercise in voice . However, there is a subtle shift in tone halfway through. As the moon approaches, Sherriff paints an uncomfortably familiar picture of a society in denial. Some insist the moon actually looks smaller, while others argue the whole issue is overblown: “Nothing would happen, but if it did, it would happen in China, where things like that used to happen.”
When the moon crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, it creates devastating storms and floods – reminiscent of news footage of the aftermath of hurricanes – that drown most of the local villagers. As Hopkins rebuilds his life with two young neighbors, he feels the warmth of human connection for the first time, but his idyll is inevitably shattered. Like the settlers of old, the nations of the world divide the moon by drawing lines on a map, only to discover that it contains vast mineral resources. This naturally leads to the emergence of a new wave of demagogues. “Most of them were worthless adventurers,” Hopkins recalls, “greedy for wealth and power, their only claim to attention being a loud voice and endless cascades of words.”