Ashes, Ashes

I'm not a betting man but I will stake a fiver that Réne Barjavel had read Albert Robida's 'Le Vingtièm Siècle' more than once before he wrote this. In many ways Ravage is a kind of antithesis of Robida's book. Both deal with a giant sprawling future Paris; Robida's set in the then future 1955, Barjavel's a near 100 years later in 2052. Both cities' residents are heavily dependant on electricity in their everyday lives. Robida was writing at a time when the application of electricity in technology was new and opened up new exciting vistas of optimistic technological inventiveness. One of the sequels was even called 'Le Vingtième siècle: La vie électrique'. Barjavel writing 60 years later was a little more restrained but still show more filled his future Paris with high speed monorails, superstrong plasticlike materials, food factories where single wheat seeds are subjected to rays and heat which force it to germinate grow and get cropped within hours, and, most extravagantly weirdly, giant glass-sided freezers in every home where people store their dead relatives posed as they would be in life. The difference though is Robida relishes his brave, exciting world of tomorrow and has great fun playing with his toys. Barjavel just sets it up to tear it down again and get his characters (and thus humanity) back on the 'right' path of patriarchal, bronze-age, polygamous family values.

Part One: The New Times - The book opens with our hero arriving in Paris ready to take his place in an art school as soon as he is accepted, which, since he has the highest grades ever seen by anyone ever, should be no problem. His main motivation in coming to the city though is to be near his childhood sweetheart, love of his life, Blanche, who left home for Paris the year before. Unbeknownst to him Blanche (the object of his unwavering devotion in a way that would have her slapping restraining orders on him these days) has other ideas. She has been offered the chance by a big impresario to become a star! (The plot here is pure three-cornered Hollywood melodrama as it is obvious that the big impresario's having full, unfettered, lusty access to Blanche's luscious bod is part of the deal.) She visits our hero in his dingy artist's flat where he is angrily trying to work out how he got turned down by the art school (his powerful rival had pulled strings to take him off the board). She takes one look at his grotty surroundings and rushes off to a life of wealth, luxury, stardom - and unfettered access.

The night of her big debut on live TV all the lights go out. Everywhere. Electricity just stops. Everything electrical fails instantaneously. TV, lights, cars, planes, trains - the lot. As most clothing in the year 2052 is held in place with magnetic clasps people's clothes suddenly fall off and they find themselves naked (though how magnetic underwear would work is a good unexplored question). Planes are the real problem as in the electric world of 2052 planes are giant, VTOL, lemon-shaped objects with gimbled seating lifted by giant electrically powered propellers, none of them have wings. When the electricity stops, they just drop out of the sky like huge dead weights and flatten buildings. The author doesn't spend any time trying to explain how or why electricity just stops. It just does.

Part Two: The Fall of the Cities. Things go to hell in a handcart very quickly. There are scenes of riots and confusion. A few chapters are spent getting our hero and his girlfriend and rival together - most of them spent going up and down a pitch black stairwell in the rival's housing block / TV studio. The Blanche has developed a sudden onset, undefined illness which means the hero and his rival have to carry her down the 90 plus storey building staircase. Outside they accost a gardener who happens to have a horse and cart. They try to buy it. He won't sell and violence follows with the rival dying by accident, and the gardener dying when our hero murders him in cold blood. (This guy has issues and goes on to kill a lot more people through the book without, seemingly, having the slightest twinge of conscience.)

Francois finds a doctor for the Blanche who, it turns out, is suffering from a mysteriously new unknown disease which only affects virgin women (!) thus reassuring our hero that no unfettered access had taken place without our author having to get into any details. Blanche recovers from this plot convenient, virgo intacta confirming illness within a few pages and realises she is really in love with Francois. Slowly our hero puts a group together while Paris REALLY does go to hell. For example: people have noticed their now unfrozen relatives are starting whiff a bit and take to throwing them out of the windows into the street.

A discarded cigarette starts a fire which spreads rapidly - the city is without water because all the electric pumpage is out of service and the Seine is full of thawing dead bodies. Half of Paris burns down as, from the other side of the river, people watch and gather at the Eiffel Tower to hold a mass pray-in. The fire reaches a munitions depot under the ancient Trocadero which explodes, and the gathered faithful die by the thousands as great chunks of concrete rain down on them squishing them flat as they cry "Save us! Save us!".

After a few chapters of looting, murdering a rival gang of looters, and generally getting their shit together, our hero and his band set out, he to return to his home in the south, everyone else because he is obviously the hero of the book and any direction away from Paris is as good as any other. So off they set out into the country, the women pushing their handmade carts and doing all the hard schlepping, the men tooled up for a fight ready to defend them and their carefully hoarded supplies of water, dried horse meat etc.

Before things go really wrong (as they will before the end of the book) the party camps for the night at a deserted electrotherapy mental asylum. Most mental illnesses in 2052 are cured by sessions in a (non-lethal) electric chair. Searching the abandoned building they find the staff had been experimenting with the newly discovered 'Oslo Ray'. This ray had been a major leap forward in physical therapies (early experiments included plucking a live chicken, irradiating it, and watching as its feathers grew back in a matter of days). According to abandoned notes found by the doctor five incurable mythomaniacs had been experimented on. The first, who was convinced he (sic) was Joan of Arc, died from spontaneous combustion, another, a puny weakling who was convinced he was Hercules, became suddenly muscular, burst out of his cell, and was cut down by the police as he was working his way, dorm by dorm, deflowering the pupils of a girl's boarding school. (Much to the chagrin of the experimenters who would have liked to have seen how far he would have managed to get.) The experiment was stopped before last two patients, who thought they were Jesus and Death respectively, showed any manifestations. In the cellar of the building the refugees from Paris find two locked cells. Forcing open the first they find the body of a dead man lying on the floor. He is marked with the stigmata. And is very dead. As they watch he comes back to life; the cell is flooded with divine light and the walls of the cell fade to infinity as he walks out past them. Things return to normal. The doctor is impatient to see what is in the next cell and, despite his companions' protestations, he breaks the door down - and instantly drops dead on the spot as an all pervading cold fills their bones. They slam the door, grab the doctor's body, and, in a moment of 'this is just so crazy it might just work', run out into the garden where they find the resurrected Jesus character giving off a beneficent light surrounded by birds and animals. They lay the body of the doctor before him and kneel. They and ask him to do a Lazarus on their friend. The Jesus character raises a hand in benediction - and disintegrates into a putrid, decomposing mass. Ah well, it was worth a try.

I'm not a Catholic - or even a Christian - so I may be missing stuff but this, and the Eiffel Tower sequence, makes me think this book might not have gone down well with the church at the time. Though, given it was written during the early days of WW2 (it is copyright dated 1943), may well be evidence for the author's possible war-induced loss of, or crisis of, faith - if he had one to start with and this isn't just an outright attack on religion - either way it is a very, very weird sequence.

The journey south continues and is a long brutal affair. There is a drought. Wildfires force them to take to a hastily improvised raft on a river - (after our hero has off-handedly executed the guard who fell asleep and didn't warn them about the encroaching fire in time). Their hastily constructed raft goes over a precipice into a previously not there chasm across the river's route. Whatever caused the electricity stopping cataclysm had made a real mess of France (and its weather). They struggle ever southward through the ashy wasteland left by the forest fires. They are attacked by millions of bats - which turn out to be a collective hallucination which leaves two of the party dead in a murder suicide escape. And on they plod...

Eventually the five remaining stragglers get back to the hero's home farm where he is greeted by his mother.

The last part: Patriarchy. In a series of short, timelapse-like chapters that span decades, Francois slowly becomes the de factor ruler of most of the south of France. The new society he builds is polygamous, and agrarian, with towns strictly limited in size. Whatever stopped electricity from working has made iron brittle and unworkable. Bronze age tech is the order of the day. One day, at a festival where people have gathered to lay gifts at the feet of their centenarian leader, there is terror and consternation as a noisy, cumbersome, six wheeled, bronze steam engine grinds into the town square. Francois is enraged. The inventor who has spent ten years working in secret is baffled. Surely this machine can do nothing but good and save people from having to work?! Francois launches into a speech about how the great cataclysm had come about just because men had done all they could to avoid doing work and hurls a rock at the man hitting him in the face. The inventor strikes back with a metal bar and staves Francois' head in. The inventor is killed. The machine is destroyed. And everyone grieves their fallen leader.

The end.

Not exactly a happy read, but given the times it was written in that is hardly surprising.
Barjavel is considered one of the fathers of modern French SF and Ravage was translated into English as 'Ashes Ashes' by Damon Knight. show less

It is the kind of dystopian future stories I usually enjoy. We are in France, somewhere in the late 21st century. Society relies entirely on electricity and synthetically produced food. One day, suddenly, everything stops working. A young man, François, who somehow didn't believe in that automated society, retrieves his childhood love and escapes disaster-ridden Paris with a few survivors. They cross France, in the end literally wading through the ashes of a great fire that engulfed cities and country alike. When they finally reach the hero's childhood area, which is almost untouched by the disaster, they found a bucolic, primitive, un-technologised society. And it was that end, told mainly through an epilogue, that is somewhat show more annoying. François has become The Patriarch, he single-handedly rebuilt society, but on such paternalistic bases that it's hard not to feel it wasn't his ambition all along.
It's an onverall enjoyable read for its subject matter, but it is very French, something I don't often go for. show less

There are better dystopias out there. A lot better. The outlook is bleak, both pre and post apocalypse, especially for women. The author, I think, had a very low opinion of women. There are a few interesting ideas explored… but I have many more criticisms than compliments. The ending though... wtf??!

Really not what a vegan, anti-natalist, feminist wants to read. I am disappointed in Barjavel.

Pas aussi bon que Malevil par Robert Merle dans le genre.

imbarazzante,soprattutto il finale...o si era stancato il traduttore,o lo scrittore.

A la primera part del llibre "Les temps nouveaux" l'autor ens exposa una visió de la societat futura, concretament el Paris de 2052. És una societat que ha trobat solucions tecnològiques als seus problemes (els aliments es produeixen en fàbriques, els morts es conserven congelats...) Però per això mateix és molt dependent de les tecnologies.
El fet d'haver estat escrit al 1942 dona un to curiós a certes previsions, com el fet d'anomenar emisions de Radio al que avui anomenariem TV en 3D, el métode de sanació mental amb electroshocks...
A la segona part "La chute des villes" arriba la catàstrofe, desapareix l'electricitat i l'hecatombe subsegüent pren dimensions apocalíptiques. Però un grup d'elegits liderats pel show more protagonista lluitarà per escapar de la destrucció i sobreviure a la barbàrie.
El llibre haguera estat molt millor sense la quarta i darrera part, "Le patriarque" on es proposa com a base de la construcció del nou món la instauració d'una societat patriarcal, un retorn al passat d'allò més retrògrad, amb crema de llibres inclosa.
Tot el llibre traspúa un cert flaire d'adoració al líder suprem (un home per suposat, les dones queden relegades al paper de reproductores de l'espècie), el cabdill que tot ho pot i tot ho controla.
Les descripcions de morts i accidents catastròfics és prou crua, gairebé sàdica en ocasions, però tot el conjunt resulta un poc naïf. show less