Page - 52 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

proto-fascist dictatorship as a solution to weak government and contempo- rary social and political crises. Displaying affinities with Nietzschean philosophy throughout, it argues that under certain conditions, dictatorship, brutality and population control may be necessary, even advantageous, for the construction of a highly efficient, eugenically shaped utopia. Thus the text offers an invalua- ble insight into the ways that eschatological narrative structures – dealing with endings and new beginnings – have been adopted by secular writers to present issues around morality, social transformation and “human nature”. The novel opens with the significantly named narrator, Flint, visiting Woth- erspoon, a scientific “dabbler” and writer for the popular press.1 In contrast to the protagonist the highly competent multi-millionaire businessman Stanley Nordenholt, Wotherspoon is inept, focussed more on his writing than on being a proficient experimenter in his studies of nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria. When an unexplained fireball mutates the denitrifying bacteria, Wotherspoon is too inattentive to notice.2 In short order, the mutated bacteria cause massive crop failure and widespread starvation. Five million English (rather than “Nor- denholt’s Million”, which is Nordenholt’s recruiting slogan) are saved only by Nordenholt’s foresight and dynamic response, as he secures resources from America and embraces the calamity as an opportunity to take control of the situation in Britain.3 After overthrowing the failing British government, Nord- enholt establishes himself as dictator, selecting those who are to survive and relocating them to a “Nitrogen Area” in the Clyde Valley. Nordenholt’s character is significant. In The Pattern of Expectation, I. F. Clarke reads Nordenholt’s Million as the source of a particular “variant on the disaster story”, the “salvation myth”, which relates “how a man of genius, usually a sci- entist, saves a remnant of humanity and lays the foundation for a better order of existence”.4 Although not a scientist, Nordenholt becomes “the architect” of a future civilisation planned and executed by Flint, his friend, and Elsa, his niece.5 As the narrative progresses, the blight not only precipitates mass star- vation but also exposes the degenerative path on which the pre-cataclysmic society had embarked. Hence, Nordenholt’s actions in the Clyde Valley provide a remedy both for the blight and for what are presented as the regressive ten- dencies of the English. At the novel’s conclusion, a new civilisation emerges and overcomes what the text has framed as the social, political and economic prob- lems of post-war Britain. 1 Connington 1923, 8. 2 Connington 1923, 27. 3 Connington 1923, 45–66. 4 Clarke 1979, 229. 5 Connington 1923, 146. 52 | Jennifer Woodward www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 51–68