Mandrake

David Queston is an anthropologist who has spent some years studying tribal communities in South America. One of those communities has gone through some catastrophe that he is trying to identify. When he has completed his studies he returns to England to write up his thoughts.

He finds England changed. A mad psychopath has taken control and is isolating the country from the world and sending everybody back to where they came from. This means local people are sent back to their family roots. i.e. families named Stewart are sent back to Scotland regardless of them never having lived there.

The Minister of Planning and then Prime Minister is named Mandrake. Two obvious parallels come to mind. First, the author would have known of the syndicated cartoon, Mandrake the Magician. He could 'gesture hypnotically' and people would be open to suggestion. Second, the mythological plant, the mandrake, screams when it is uprooted. Both these metaphors run through the book. Everybody seems under the thrall of Mandrake.

Queston spends two years in a quiet country cottage writing up his notes, unaware that the social structures around him are failing so badly. Then men from the Ministry of Planning call on him. They want his notes and they want his mind. His research is too close to revealing what is happening in England. He goes on the run.

As England dissolves into a dystopian hellscape it seems that there is a malevolent intelligence driving everything. From isolationist paranoia to earthquakes and wild snowstorms, everything is bent on the destruction of the country and dead bodies line the streets. Queston and some companions he finds along the way are torn between escaping it and facing it to destroy it.

The darkness increases as Cooper sets the scene of humans against the unknown. Is it supernatural evil? Is it aliens? Is it some new weapon system? The tension builds and the end of the book approaches. The reader asks, "Are all these threads going to get tied up by the end?"

No spoilers, folks.