Just Finished Reading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

The Second Sleep, at first glance a novel set in the Dark Ages more than five hundred years ago, turns out instead to be eight hundred years into the future when our science and technology-based society has been abandoned for a church-run theocracy reminiscent of that earlier era.  A young priest serving the powerful bishop based in Exeter, England is assigned to look into the death of the priest stationed in a relatively isolated village in the country's southwestern section.  After arriving for what he thought would be a very brief stay, he finds himself first mysteriously delayed from returning with a suspicious treefall blocking his road and then discovering that the deceased priest had been investigating the fall of our contemporary hi-tech civilization following the calamity that occurred in our year 2025.  He gets introduced to different characters, each with their own distinct personalities and pasts...and the story intertwines his developing relationships with them with the clues leading to the climactic discovery at the end.  And the ending...well, in a word, I can only say that it's rude.  Two words? Very rude...

The term "second sleep" refers to the second part of the night, with that latter half of the sleep cycle supposedly different in nature than the first.  Allegorically, it refers here to the sleep that civilization is going through after the disaster that the author forecast just six years from this book's publication in 2019.  It was chilling that one component of the catastrophe that ripped apart society was a worldwide plague...now that's too close for comfort.  Civil unrest and the unraveling of our economy...including the endangerment of our food supply...are also covered here: Robert Harris seemed to figure it all out just months before the proverbial pile hit the fan: incredible.  The Second Sleep isn't a long novel by any stretch and reads well.  I've read a couple of science fiction short stories with theocratic themes like this, set either on a future Earth or another planet.  It's not my favorite subject, but you may think otherwise...