The Chalk Giants
Keith Roberts
217 pages
published in 1974

Keith Roberts was a British science fiction writer, who came on the scene during the socalled New Wave of the mid sixties. His best known work is the alternate history novel Pavane. His writing was literate, somewhat pessimistic and at times intensely visual. He unfortunately died in 2000.

The Chalk Giants is a collection of five linked stories, telling of how civilisation starts up again in the British Isles after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed ours. The first story is set a few years after the holocaust happened, the other four are set, as far as I can tell, several hundred years later. Don't expect the standard post-apocalyptic cliches; this is the story of the rebirth of civilisation, with little of the old one remaining.

The first story, "Monkey and Pru and Sal" is set just after the war and is not very interesting. The second two stories are "The God House" and "The Beautiful One" are linked and tell a familiar story of an older, peaceful civilisation being overrun by a younger more vigorious one. The last two stories "Rand, Rat and the Dancing Man" and "Usk the Jokeman" are set even further down the line, in quasi-medieval times.

What I like about these stories is the lush way in which Keith Roberts writes about them and the sense of melancholy that underlies them. Humankind rebuilts civilisation, but the same old mistakes are made. Greed, vanity, lust for war, all the old sins are still present and get full play. Yet even so these are still hopeful stories, not downbeat.

The edition I read this in was the Berkly Medallion edition of 1976, which misses the framing story of the original UK edition. Though I did not miss this while reading The Chalk Giants, I do have this nagging this would've firmed up the book as a whole, as without it it doesn't as much end as peter out.