jacey | Booklog 12/26: Robert Harris: The Second Sleep

Audiobook narrated by Roy McMillan

Christopher Fairfax, priest, rides across remote Exmoor in the 1400s, sent by the Bishop of Exeter, to find an isolated village with a dead priest awaiting burial… except it’s not the 1400s you might think. This is gradually revealed to be a post-apocalyptic landscape, 800 years after some unknown cataclysm. It’s regressed to pre-industrial revolution levels of living. Science is proscribed, and even researching into the past and its artifacts can get you branded (literally) a heretic. The church is law. Law is the church. What Fairfax finds in that village leads him to question truths that have always been self-evident to a young believer. Expect religion, science and the apocalypse. The writing is superb, the story gripping, and Roy McMillan (who also narrated Conclave) is a perfect narrator. He subsumes his narration to the story while still subtly delineating character voices.