Set in the future, John Burnside outlines a Utopian vision

Havergey. By John Burnside. Little Toller; 167 pages; $23 and £12.

LIKE the narrator of “News from Nowhere”, the novel that William Morris brought out in 1890, the protagonist of “Havergey”, John Burnside’s monograph, goes to sleep in 2017 and wakes to find himself in a futuristic community. Everything there is shared, and the natural order is always judged to be more important than human schemes.

A catastrophic series of plagues, known as “The Dark Time” or “The Collapse”, has reduced the global population from over 8bn to fewer than 2bn. Much of the world is “overrun with free pollutants and marauders”. But on Havergey, an island off the coast of Scotland, a small Utopian society has formed. Confined to a cabin known as “Quarantine”, Mr Burnside’s protagonist John—who travels to the future in a contraption made to look like a blue police box and called Tardis B—is given a series of documents that reveal the history of the island and its inhabitants, and help him understand the anarchic principles on which the community is based.

The premise sounds like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, but Mr Burnside is more interested in exposition than plot and characterisation. “Individual stories didn’t matter, it was the ideas that mattered,” one of his characters says in an aside that might be describing the book itself. The fictional premise is a scaffold on which the author hangs his theories about how to create an ecological and economic Utopian society.

Havergey’s citizens believe that “there is no human order that could be preferred to the natural order”—for which they use the Chinese word tao, meaning path, key or principle. To this end, they meditate daily, outlaw the concept of individual ownership and try to maintain an ever-shifting balance with nature in the understanding that “Utopia is bound to be relative” and “only the moment is perfect.”

As they describe the island gradually returning to its wild state, a process they call the “Chernobyl Effect”, Mr Burnside’s characters condemn the damage done to the planet by the “Machine People”, as modern civilisation is known. Much of the humour in the book is derived from a futuristic perspective on some of mankind’s cultural idiosyncrasies, from sitting “in dark rooms watching a little box in the corner for hours on end” to paying people to make music that all sounds the same.

Mr Burnside raises some interesting moral questions as he explores the idea of a society governed by principles of honour and community, where killing is sometimes “the only way”. Short of a catastrophic epidemic, however, his vision will remain elusive. “Overpopulation was not a sexy subject,” John says, reflecting on why nothing was done to curb it. Mr Burnside’s sci-fi approach may be what is needed to get people talking.