The Hopkins Manuscript

English screenwriter and playwright Sherriff (Journey’s End), who died in 1975, first published this droll postapocalyptic yarn in 1939. It has the effect of H.G. Wells rewritten by Evelyn Waugh, and the narrator’s reflections continue to resonate: “Today, when all attempt at organised government has long since passed,” begins one chapter. The Edgar Hopkins of the title is living out his final days quite happily in a quaint English village, until he learns that the moon is hurtling towards Earth, putting the country’s fears about the Nazis on the back burner. A retired teacher, Hopkins decides to record the presumed end of civilization for posterity. A scholarly foreword to Hopkins’s journal, published a millennium after his death, explains how Great Britain has remained a “deserted, ghost-haunted waste” because nobody wants to live in its cold, damp climate, and notes that Hopkins possessed both “unquenchable self-esteem and limited vision.” Indeed, Hopkins imagines an elevation of his social status via his knowledge of the cataclysm to come. Sherriff’s a confident and graceful stylist, and his greatest achievement is keeping his multiple subgenres in play simultaneously. The threat of the lunar collision builds incrementally, pulsing beneath Hopkins’s commentary on his fellow villagers’ deficient response to disaster. This delivers on multiple levels. (Jan.)