This is a PA love story (better reviewed by the Mount Benson Report and Olman's 50). A sudden reduction in solar radiation results in a significant cooling of the northern hemisphere and the emergence of a new ice age. The story centers around Andrew, David and their wives. Andrew produces a television show and David is a mid-level civil servant. They are introduced to one another at a cocktail party. Andrew's wife subsequently leaves him for David and David's timid wife begins a loving relationship with Andrew even though it lacks intimacy.
As the weather gets colder, critical supplies begin to dwindle and violence increases. The government gives up most of the country and establishes "green zones" around key cities leaving most of the population outside the zones to fend for themselves. Carol, Andrew's ex-wife, leaves with their children and moves to Nigeria and soon afterwards Andrew and David's ex-wife move to Nigeria as well on the promise that David will follow them soon. There is subtle social commentary throughout the book focused on racism in the west, this commentary is magnified when the elite white's move to Nigeria and find that they are the underclass and are forced into doing menial low paying jobs for their black task masters.
In Nigeria, after a dark false start, Andrew manages to land another television production job and begins to lead a good life for himself and David's ex. At the same time his ex-wife becomes a live in prostitute for a wealthy Nigerian business man. The Nigerian authorities concoct a plan to invade England and Andrew joins the mission and returns to London where he finds David's ex-wife who had left Andrew and moved back to England in order to be with David.
I have not described the soap opera aspects of this book in as much detail as I could but I think that you catch the drift. It's a good book and a quick read.
1 comment:
Arg, fucking blogger just sucked up my comment!#@#$
Anyways, what I was saying was that this book seems to have four seperate parts, the world getting colder part, the soap opera part, the anti-colonial africa part and the raid on London part. I really enjoyed three out of four of those parts, but the whole thing is a bit disjointed. I suspect that Christopher may have gotten cheated on because a similar theme comes up in a lot of his books from this period.
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