By RENÉ BARJAVEL (Modern Literary Editions; 1943/67)
Few sf authors can resist the chance to destroy civilization in their fiction, and in ASHES, ASHES France’s late René Barjavel (1911-1985) jumped into the fray with great enthusiasm. If anything, he was a bit too enthusiastic, creating an extended Hieronymus Boschian cavalcade of destruction in a futuristic milieu.
The setting of this novel, translated by American SF legend Damon Knight, is France in the year 2052. So myriad are the technological advancements of this “First Century of the Age of Reason” that Barjavel spends nearly fifty pages laying them out. The future shock on display includes elevated railways, aboveground cities, corpses preserved in hermetically sealed conservatories (in place of “the old muck heaps known as cemeteries”), airplanes that resemble “a lemon balanced with its pointed end painted up” and a population that has swelled to (gasp!) 25 million.
Amid all this speculative scene-setting we’re introduced to 22 year old Francois Deschamps, a peasant attending college in Paris, and his rich girlfriend Blanche, who doubles as a famous singer known as Regina Vox, and who rattles her beloved by getting engaged to a much wealthier, better connected man. As any student of catastrophe literature well knows, such soap opera dynamics serve to hook the reader into an intimate character-based drama that serves as a gateway to what becomes a panoramic disaster novel.
That disaster involves the “Black Emperor” of Rio de Janeiro declaring war on the white race, resulting in the shutting down of France’s electrical current. This has the effect of causing cars to crash and planes to drop out of the sky, and results in mass destruction as “the law of the jungle had become the law of the city.” Described in a panoramic manner, we’re given overarching descriptions of people “frying like sausages” in a subway fire, agitated crowds flowing “like ants when someone stamps on the anthill” and the many non-interred corpses rotting in place. Mass fires break out and dangerous gangs roam the land, forcing Francois to organize a gang of his own.
More outrages follow until things finally turn around in the final pages, grouped into a section entitled “The Patriarchy.” Here Francois attempts to rebuild society by, among other things, forcing his populace into polygamous unions and burning all books (they being “the very spirit of evil”). Everything seems well in this apparent utopia until a technological contraption is introduced that threatens to recommence the insanity.
If anything, this novel proves Science Fiction is a genre that dates more dramatically than just about any other. I imagine ASHES, ASHES was quite a mind-roaster in its day, but its depiction of the end of civilization now seems overwrought and fanciful, with surreal and supernatural elements diluting what was supposed to be a piece of hard-hitting realism, and an under 200 page count that fails to do justice to the author’s epic vision.
What remains of interest is the imaginative audacity. There’s a perverse satisfaction in experiencing an author painstakingly constructing a future society and then systematically destroying it. Furthermore, Barjavel’s overriding message, that technological progress only renders a society more vulnerable, is a pertinent one, and far more so today, I’d argue, than when ASHES, ASHES was written.