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mbenzz's review against another edition
5.0
Well! That was a depressingly good romp through the apocalypse!
I'm not sure when this book takes place, but I think it's around 1965 when it was first published. Matthew, the main character, lives on the Isle of Guernsey, just off the coast of France in the English channel. A series of earthquakes completely devastates the landscape and kills millions of people. He, along with Billy, an 11-year-old boy whom he rescues, journey out along the now barren seafloor to England in search of Matthews daughter Jane.
This book was wonderful. Very descriptive without being over-the-top, and you really feel the struggle that each character faces. There were some scenes of violence, but they were muted. Violence among the survivors is not the main focus here. Sure, it exists, and the author brings it to light, but this is more about one man and child making their way through their new environment, and figuring out what the future will look like for them.
If you're into street-gangs and apocalyptic fighting, then this is not the book for you.
Anyway, I absolutely recommend this book! I don't know why I waited so long to read it, but I'm glad I finally did!
I'm not sure when this book takes place, but I think it's around 1965 when it was first published. Matthew, the main character, lives on the Isle of Guernsey, just off the coast of France in the English channel. A series of earthquakes completely devastates the landscape and kills millions of people. He, along with Billy, an 11-year-old boy whom he rescues, journey out along the now barren seafloor to England in search of Matthews daughter Jane.
This book was wonderful. Very descriptive without being over-the-top, and you really feel the struggle that each character faces. There were some scenes of violence, but they were muted. Violence among the survivors is not the main focus here. Sure, it exists, and the author brings it to light, but this is more about one man and child making their way through their new environment, and figuring out what the future will look like for them.
If you're into street-gangs and apocalyptic fighting, then this is not the book for you.
Anyway, I absolutely recommend this book! I don't know why I waited so long to read it, but I'm glad I finally did!
jimmypat's review against another edition
5.0
A Wrinkle in the Skin is an enthralling, extraordinarily somber but redemptive novel of cataclysmic disaster. The book has a warning, not of global catastrophe, but one of cutting yourself off from humanity to live a life of fantasy and self-focus.
sethlynch's review against another edition
4.0
British Sci-Fi survivor novel – first published 1965. It’s a format I enjoy and John Christopher is good at it – HG Wells pretty much invented this sub-genre and Christopher turned it into the format we know now. With HG Wells it is about forming a better world after the destruction of the old. With Christopher it is about lowest common denominators, gangs getting together being told what to do by the most brutal of leaders. Intelligence is no match for force – in the short term at least. Longer term they thoughtful, if they are still alive, may have the chance to establish themselves.
In this book the earth is hit by a series of earthquakes – the English Channel is now more. The hero is living in Guernsey at the time of the quakes. The story is his story as he learns to adapt to the new, post-quake, world.
This book is good but if you haven’t read it The Death of Grass, also by John Christopher, is probably better.
In this book the earth is hit by a series of earthquakes – the English Channel is now more. The hero is living in Guernsey at the time of the quakes. The story is his story as he learns to adapt to the new, post-quake, world.
This book is good but if you haven’t read it The Death of Grass, also by John Christopher, is probably better.
markyon's review against another edition
3.0
So, this was one that came up in a discussion of post-apocalyptic novels. Although it is not one based on viral pandemics, it does follow that similar idea of global catastrophe causing change, as did John’s other, perhaps more famous novel, The Death of Grass, which I reviewed here in 2009.
This one starts like something out of a middle-class John Wyndham novel. Matthew Cotter is a tomato grower in the balmy climate that exists on the island of Guernsey. In the first few chapters we meet divorcee Matthew who seems to be living a very pleasant life and his lovely neighbours who also appear to live in a peaceful rural landscape without too much grief or fuss.
Once all this is set up of course we then get the catastrophe. There is a major earthquake which flattens Matthew’s village into rubble. We later discover that this is one of what appears to be global earthquakes. This one is so extreme that the English Channel, the body of water separating the islands of Guernsey from the mainland of Britain, is drained.
In the next few chapters Matthew finds himself forlornly looking for other survivors. All of the buildings have been destroyed and Christopher doesn’t spare us the gruesome details of bodies in the rubble. To a readership a mere twenty years after the horrors of World War II this must bring back some dreadful memories.
After a few days Matthew finds Billy, a young boy now orphaned, and together they travel looking for other survivors and food. Unfortunately, Billy and Matthew do not meet many who are friendly. One group led by a thug named Miller has effectively reverted to slavery, with young women being kept for housework and future breeding purposes. However, Miller realises that Matthew is an educated man and sees Matthew as a viable Deputy to himself in order to survive as a group. Matthew goes along with him, but secretly is biding his time to escape. He hopes to go find Jenny, his teenage daughter living in Sussex. Eventually Matthew slips away only to find that Billy has followed him. Together they decide to walk along the now dry seabed of the English Channel to get to the mainland.
The story could go in two directions. We could have the epic sweep of descriptions around the world to show that this is a global phenomenon – for if it wasn’t, where are the aid workers from other countries? Instead the story focuses on Matthew and Billy, which makes the events seem both more personal and more understandable. They soon realise that even on the mainland there is no chance of assistance. Towns are also reduced to rubble. There are no radio messages, no aeroplanes seen – everywhere is reduced to its basics. Parts of the coast have collapsed into the sea.
However, this is not the main focus of the story. Instead we experience what is happening around Matthew and Billy. On their travels they meet other people but most of them are in shock and avoiding others, as gangs of scavengers travel around attacking other groups and stealing their food and resources. The world seems to have reverted back to barbarism, something that Christopher doesn’t flinch from describing. There is brutality, child abuse and rape. Some of the most harrowing scenes are when one of the women tells of her experiences in the hands of other men in a matter-of-fact manner.
Others deal with the stress of the situation oddly, and Christopher does well to describe some of the characters clearly in shock. Matthew and Billy meet a survivor on board a ship now stranded on the dry seabed of the English Channel. The captain is friendly and gives the travellers food, a bed to sleep in and clothes, but we later discover is a person coping with the calamity by trying to control things on the ship to an unhealthy degree. There are religious zealots ranting on the devastated streets.
In the end there is a solution, but it is one born more of resignation rather than positivity. The ending has a degree of optimism but there are some quite dark moments to get through before that.
A Wrinkle in the Skin shows us the fragility of British society – or at least society in the 1960s – and how quickly people can be reduced to their basest instincts once difficulties arise. There is no Dunkirk spirit here, no “We’re in it together” moments or sacrifice for the greater good as you might expect in, say, a John Wyndham version of the story. Instead it is a ferocious description of the survival of the strongest, something which the author does not shy away from. Even 55 years after its publication, the book can shock. When it was first published it must have been even more so.
In short, the book is an interesting and perhaps more realistic take than many novels on the consequences of global disaster. It is a story of a more innocent and less sophisticated time, but simultaneously a reminder that people survive with resilience and endurance, not long having experienced the horrors of the Blitz, Dresden and Auschwitz. It is at times harsh and brutal, and a product of its time, but still manages to engage, even if it is a case of what would have happened fifty-odd years ago.
Like most of the Christopher novels I have read, this one engages and keeps those pages turning, but also doesn’t flinch from describing brutality and horror. A Wrinkle in the Skin is a sobering reminder that global catastrophe, whatever we may think, is not a recent phenomenon. It made me feel lucky for the things I have and the relationships I’ve got, even in these difficult times, and for that alone it was worth a read.
This one starts like something out of a middle-class John Wyndham novel. Matthew Cotter is a tomato grower in the balmy climate that exists on the island of Guernsey. In the first few chapters we meet divorcee Matthew who seems to be living a very pleasant life and his lovely neighbours who also appear to live in a peaceful rural landscape without too much grief or fuss.
Once all this is set up of course we then get the catastrophe. There is a major earthquake which flattens Matthew’s village into rubble. We later discover that this is one of what appears to be global earthquakes. This one is so extreme that the English Channel, the body of water separating the islands of Guernsey from the mainland of Britain, is drained.
In the next few chapters Matthew finds himself forlornly looking for other survivors. All of the buildings have been destroyed and Christopher doesn’t spare us the gruesome details of bodies in the rubble. To a readership a mere twenty years after the horrors of World War II this must bring back some dreadful memories.
After a few days Matthew finds Billy, a young boy now orphaned, and together they travel looking for other survivors and food. Unfortunately, Billy and Matthew do not meet many who are friendly. One group led by a thug named Miller has effectively reverted to slavery, with young women being kept for housework and future breeding purposes. However, Miller realises that Matthew is an educated man and sees Matthew as a viable Deputy to himself in order to survive as a group. Matthew goes along with him, but secretly is biding his time to escape. He hopes to go find Jenny, his teenage daughter living in Sussex. Eventually Matthew slips away only to find that Billy has followed him. Together they decide to walk along the now dry seabed of the English Channel to get to the mainland.
The story could go in two directions. We could have the epic sweep of descriptions around the world to show that this is a global phenomenon – for if it wasn’t, where are the aid workers from other countries? Instead the story focuses on Matthew and Billy, which makes the events seem both more personal and more understandable. They soon realise that even on the mainland there is no chance of assistance. Towns are also reduced to rubble. There are no radio messages, no aeroplanes seen – everywhere is reduced to its basics. Parts of the coast have collapsed into the sea.
However, this is not the main focus of the story. Instead we experience what is happening around Matthew and Billy. On their travels they meet other people but most of them are in shock and avoiding others, as gangs of scavengers travel around attacking other groups and stealing their food and resources. The world seems to have reverted back to barbarism, something that Christopher doesn’t flinch from describing. There is brutality, child abuse and rape. Some of the most harrowing scenes are when one of the women tells of her experiences in the hands of other men in a matter-of-fact manner.
Others deal with the stress of the situation oddly, and Christopher does well to describe some of the characters clearly in shock. Matthew and Billy meet a survivor on board a ship now stranded on the dry seabed of the English Channel. The captain is friendly and gives the travellers food, a bed to sleep in and clothes, but we later discover is a person coping with the calamity by trying to control things on the ship to an unhealthy degree. There are religious zealots ranting on the devastated streets.
In the end there is a solution, but it is one born more of resignation rather than positivity. The ending has a degree of optimism but there are some quite dark moments to get through before that.
A Wrinkle in the Skin shows us the fragility of British society – or at least society in the 1960s – and how quickly people can be reduced to their basest instincts once difficulties arise. There is no Dunkirk spirit here, no “We’re in it together” moments or sacrifice for the greater good as you might expect in, say, a John Wyndham version of the story. Instead it is a ferocious description of the survival of the strongest, something which the author does not shy away from. Even 55 years after its publication, the book can shock. When it was first published it must have been even more so.
In short, the book is an interesting and perhaps more realistic take than many novels on the consequences of global disaster. It is a story of a more innocent and less sophisticated time, but simultaneously a reminder that people survive with resilience and endurance, not long having experienced the horrors of the Blitz, Dresden and Auschwitz. It is at times harsh and brutal, and a product of its time, but still manages to engage, even if it is a case of what would have happened fifty-odd years ago.
Like most of the Christopher novels I have read, this one engages and keeps those pages turning, but also doesn’t flinch from describing brutality and horror. A Wrinkle in the Skin is a sobering reminder that global catastrophe, whatever we may think, is not a recent phenomenon. It made me feel lucky for the things I have and the relationships I’ve got, even in these difficult times, and for that alone it was worth a read.
edgeworth's review against another edition
3.0
A series of unprecedented earthquakes wreaks havoc across the globe, laying waste to Western Europe and leaving protagonist Matthew Cotter as one of the few survivors on the island of Guernsey, having fortuitously been outside in the middle of the night when the quake collapsed most structures. The earthquake has dramatically changed the landscape and drained the English Channel, and Matthew eventually resolves to trek north across the dry seabed to try to find his daughter in England.
It’s an original conceit for an apocalyptic novel, but unfortunately suffers from being written by somebody who had perhaps at this point in his career written too many of them. Literally the first day after the disaster, Matthew has accepted that this is truly the end of civilisation and is speculating about how things will unfold for the survivors not just in the days and weeks ahead, but the years and generations; I’m sure a writer of post-apocalyptic fiction would do that, but probably not a Guernsey horticulturalist. It’s also only a few days before the dozen other Guernsey survivors are descending into caveman rule, asserting which men “own” which women and so on, and when Matthew gets to the mainland he finds it’s collapsed into brutal anarchy with survivors killing and raping and plundering with abandon, when there’s not even any real scarcity or competition for resources yet. (The vast majority of people are dead; tinned food lies in every ruin for the taking.) This is in stark contrast to Christopher’s earlier novel The Death of Grass, which illustrates how civility and peacefulness can crumble quite quickly when there are suddenly too many mouths and not enough food, i.e. when there is a material reason for them to do so. In A Wrinkle in the Skin it just seems silly.
The Death of Grass is also the superior novel for demonstrating, unlike much post-apocalyptic fiction, that most people would be quite willing to hurt others to save themselves and their children; it does so by having the main characters violently attack and kill an innocent family to take their food, flipping the usual cliche of “good people” and “bad people” that you see even in acclaimed post-apocalyptic fiction like The Road. A Wrinkle in the Skin, on the other hand, hews more closely to Christopher’s curiously English outlook I identified in The World in Winter: his conceit (laid out here explicitly, at one point) that in the event of a disaster like this, the middle class would be a steady, civilised hand on the tiller while the working class, if left to themselves, would descend into a violent, anarchic rabble, referred to here as “oiks” or “yobbos.”
It’s a fairly offensive stance, though difficult to tell how much of it is subconscious and how much Christopher would have held to it if anybody had ever challenged him on it. Maybe it was also present in his better novels like The Death of Grass, and I unwittingly passed over it; I read them when I was much younger and before I’d lived in England and realised how pervasive their class structure is even in the 21st century, let alone Christopher’s day. I don’t have any illusions about whether peaceful civilisation could endure an event like this, but I don’t believe that it would disintegrate that quickly, and I certainly don’t believe it would fragment along class lines – that’s a ridiculous English fantasy. (And this is all without touching on the book’s sexism which at times becomes outright misogyny, puzzlingly uncharacteristic of Christopher.)
It’s still a decent book for all that. I try not to judge writers too harshly for being a product of their age, and it really only stuck out here for me because it’s by far the most explicit presentation of Christopher’s class prejudice I’ve yet read. There are some great set-pieces, particularly the trek across the dried-out seabed of the English Channel, and the half-mad Greek captain living in his luxurious beached tanker. There’s an interesting dynamic that develops between Matthew and the young boy he rescues and takes under his wing, with the former feeling a constant guilt for endangering the kid by dragging him across England looking for his own daughter. A Wrinkle in the Skin is a good read; just take Christopher’s prognostications about how the post-apocalyptic chips might fall with a pinch of salt.
It’s an original conceit for an apocalyptic novel, but unfortunately suffers from being written by somebody who had perhaps at this point in his career written too many of them. Literally the first day after the disaster, Matthew has accepted that this is truly the end of civilisation and is speculating about how things will unfold for the survivors not just in the days and weeks ahead, but the years and generations; I’m sure a writer of post-apocalyptic fiction would do that, but probably not a Guernsey horticulturalist. It’s also only a few days before the dozen other Guernsey survivors are descending into caveman rule, asserting which men “own” which women and so on, and when Matthew gets to the mainland he finds it’s collapsed into brutal anarchy with survivors killing and raping and plundering with abandon, when there’s not even any real scarcity or competition for resources yet. (The vast majority of people are dead; tinned food lies in every ruin for the taking.) This is in stark contrast to Christopher’s earlier novel The Death of Grass, which illustrates how civility and peacefulness can crumble quite quickly when there are suddenly too many mouths and not enough food, i.e. when there is a material reason for them to do so. In A Wrinkle in the Skin it just seems silly.
The Death of Grass is also the superior novel for demonstrating, unlike much post-apocalyptic fiction, that most people would be quite willing to hurt others to save themselves and their children; it does so by having the main characters violently attack and kill an innocent family to take their food, flipping the usual cliche of “good people” and “bad people” that you see even in acclaimed post-apocalyptic fiction like The Road. A Wrinkle in the Skin, on the other hand, hews more closely to Christopher’s curiously English outlook I identified in The World in Winter: his conceit (laid out here explicitly, at one point) that in the event of a disaster like this, the middle class would be a steady, civilised hand on the tiller while the working class, if left to themselves, would descend into a violent, anarchic rabble, referred to here as “oiks” or “yobbos.”
It’s a fairly offensive stance, though difficult to tell how much of it is subconscious and how much Christopher would have held to it if anybody had ever challenged him on it. Maybe it was also present in his better novels like The Death of Grass, and I unwittingly passed over it; I read them when I was much younger and before I’d lived in England and realised how pervasive their class structure is even in the 21st century, let alone Christopher’s day. I don’t have any illusions about whether peaceful civilisation could endure an event like this, but I don’t believe that it would disintegrate that quickly, and I certainly don’t believe it would fragment along class lines – that’s a ridiculous English fantasy. (And this is all without touching on the book’s sexism which at times becomes outright misogyny, puzzlingly uncharacteristic of Christopher.)
It’s still a decent book for all that. I try not to judge writers too harshly for being a product of their age, and it really only stuck out here for me because it’s by far the most explicit presentation of Christopher’s class prejudice I’ve yet read. There are some great set-pieces, particularly the trek across the dried-out seabed of the English Channel, and the half-mad Greek captain living in his luxurious beached tanker. There’s an interesting dynamic that develops between Matthew and the young boy he rescues and takes under his wing, with the former feeling a constant guilt for endangering the kid by dragging him across England looking for his own daughter. A Wrinkle in the Skin is a good read; just take Christopher’s prognostications about how the post-apocalyptic chips might fall with a pinch of salt.
jayrothermel's review against another edition
5.0
Globe-girdling earthquakes (too polite and modest a term for the earth changes John Christopher describes herein) wipe out the old human civilization. A new age dawns, born in blood and filth. Those who work cooperatively fare no better than the gangs of 'yobboes' who rape, beat, kill and generally pursue marauding as a way to engage in what Marx called primary accumulation.
It's a fierce, economical, excellent novel, more bitter than bittersweet, more cold than cozy. There's at least a thousand years of night ahead of these characters and their descendants.
It's a fierce, economical, excellent novel, more bitter than bittersweet, more cold than cozy. There's at least a thousand years of night ahead of these characters and their descendants.
jameseckman's review
2.0
One of those English disaster novels that were so popular in the 50s and 60s. J.G. Ballard wrote a fair number of these as well.
dearbhla's review
3.0
In the 1960s a wave of earthquakes brings destruction around the globe. Isolated off the British coast Matthew Cotter thinks that they will be okay, Britain is far from any earthquake zone, pity the poor devils on a fault, but that’s all happening far away. But of course you can’t have a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story without the apocalypse can you?
One night while Matthew is outside, waiting for a dog that has been attacking his chickens the quake hits. Outside, protected by a bamboo thicket Matthew survives, but this was no minor earthquake, the entire island is no a ruin. Cotter sets off looking for anyone else who may have survived. All the time wondering about his daughter Jane on the mainland. Could she possibly have survived?
Full review : http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2013/12/a-wrinkle-in-the-skin/
One night while Matthew is outside, waiting for a dog that has been attacking his chickens the quake hits. Outside, protected by a bamboo thicket Matthew survives, but this was no minor earthquake, the entire island is no a ruin. Cotter sets off looking for anyone else who may have survived. All the time wondering about his daughter Jane on the mainland. Could she possibly have survived?
Full review : http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2013/12/a-wrinkle-in-the-skin/
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