The Death of Grass

This is no cosy dystopia. I was shocked by the violence and ruthlessness of the protagonists. This is a prescient novel, written 64 years before COVID-19, about a virus that emerges from China and ravages the world. Instead of infecting humans, the virus kills all grass. Brutal decisions are made, and any sense of law and order disappears.
We were a gnat’s whisker from this happening in the UK, and I was impressed with Priest’s vision. The book cracks along at a good pace, too.

My friend read a critical book arguing that John Christopher’s apocalypse novel had been forgotten. Not by me, she said. “I read it in 1972, and I can remember every word - the terror of the tale and how everything collapses so rapidly.” I immediately ordered The Death of Grass and discovered an uncannily contemporary Penguin Classic, published in 1956 and more frightening than Lord of the Flies.

In this ecological apocalypse, the virus that kills all Leersia Oryzoides - grass, rice, wheat, oats, barley, and rye - originates in China. The earth dies slowly, famine looms, and civil… show more.

Spare, grim, and minimalist. This is the kind of book I really like, a giant middle finger to the nice, safe suburban sensibilities.

With this disease, which kills all grasses and thus the basic food supply, the thin civilisational veneer is smashed to bits quickly and the England of tea, warm beer, and cricket on the village green is replaced with mass starvation, rapists, murderers, jungle law, atom bombs, and a Hobbesian all-against-all.

This is a story and writing gripping and direct that makes you square up to the fact that you would very likely set aside the moral for… show more.

Every now and then, we need a reality check; we need to remind ourselves that we are very much dependent on events over which we have no control and that a small event may end up causing our view of our self-important world to crumble. The Chung-Li virus that starts everything in this hauntingly realistic novel teaches us how insignificant we are compared to the forces that govern events on this planet. I felt much humbler after reading this book, and in a good way.