The Quiet Earth Read online

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  CRAIG HARRISON was born in Leeds in 1942 and educated at Prince Henry’s Grammar School, Otley. His rocket experiments in 1958 drew press and police attention, and an invitation to address the British Interplanetary Society.

  Harrison attended Leeds University, where he received a BA and an MA. He organised the Liberal Party campaign in Ripon Division, Yorkshire, for the 1964 general election.

  He arrived in New Zealand in 1966 after being appointed a lecturer in the English Department at Massey University. There he devised a course in art history, which he taught from 1968 until his retirement in 2000.

  His award-winning satirical play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (1974) was performed for a quarter of a century, including in the Soviet Union. The novel that was its genesis, Broken October, was published in 1976. He is the author of five other plays, including the prize-winning Ground Level (1974), which led to a comic novel of the same name (1981) and a television series, Joe & Koro.

  The Quiet Earth, a speculative novel, appeared in 1981 and in 1985 was adapted by Geoff Murphy into an acclaimed feature film starring Bruno Lawrence, Pete Smith and Alison Routledge.

  Craig Harrison’s most recent book, the young adult science-fiction comedy The Dumpster Saga, was a finalist in the 2008 New Zealand Post Book Awards. He lives in Palmerston North.

  BERNARD BECKETT is a high school teacher in Wellington. He has published ten works of fiction, including the metaphysical novels Genesis and August.

  ALSO BY CRAIG HARRISON

  Fiction

  Broken October: New Zealand, 1985

  Ground Level

  Days of Starlight

  Grievous Bodily

  The Dumpster Saga

  Non-fiction

  How to Be a Pom

  The Quiet Earth

  Craig Harrison

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Craig Harrison 1981

  Introduction copyright © Bernard Beckett 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in New Zealand by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd 1981

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147059

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148131

  Author: Harrison, Craig, 1942-, author.

  Title: The quiet earth / by Craig Harrison ; introduced by Bernard Beckett.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: NZ823.2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  No Exit

  by Bernard Beckett

  The Quiet Earth

  No Exit

  by Bernard Beckett

  A CHILD cries out in the night for its parent. The parent responds. Perhaps it is thirsty, or had a nightmare, or is tangled in its bedclothes? No, it just needs a reassuring cuddle. It needs to know it isn’t alone.

  In Craig Harrison’s The Quiet Earth—first published in 1981 and loosely adapted into a cult sci-fi film four years later—it is not a child who awakens, but an adult, our narrator. John Hobson is not alone in the dark, but rather comes to with a flash of light at 6.12 a.m. in a motel room in Thames, on New Zealand’s North Island. And when he calls out into the world, nobody answers. Every home, every car, every shop and street is deserted. The concept cuts so cleanly to the heart of our most basic fears that the most surprising thing, as you enter this novel, is the realisation that you haven’t read the story before.

  Perhaps the reason it is not a narrative staple is that the challenges inherent in telling it are so daunting. At some stage, in a novel like this, the reader must be offered an explanation. Yes, it would be a terrifying, searching experience to wake up as the last person left on Earth, but under what fictional circumstances can that scenario be made credible? In narrative terms, Harrison’s opening gambit is like a crime writer opening with an exotic set of clues to a hideous case. It is a wager: stay with my story and I will bring this home. The reader, by picking up such a tale, enters into a contract—one that creates a special tension. We are at once fascinated and wary, hoping the author can pull it off.

  The other challenge is the extremely limited palette the writer gives himself. With nobody for the protagonist to talk to, nobody to generate external conflict, the novel must develop through a single character and his response to the nightmare scenario. A short story has permission to observe, to linger inside impressions and fears, but a novel of this type avoids storytelling at its peril. Harrison, who acknowledges his echoing of a ‘childhood favourite’, Robinson Crusoe, instead embraces it.

  The artfulness with which both these challenges are met sets this book apart. It is a high-concept novel, and within the New Zealand literary tradition that already places it comfortably in the minority. The greater appeal, though, is not the freshness of the concept but its execution.

  Initially, the story moves through the actions and emotions we might expect of the protagonist. Hobson does as we would do: he searches, pieces together tantalising clues (all the clocks have stopped at 6.12, yet surely some should have been running fast or slow), listens in to the radio static, and battles his rising sense of terror. Fear not just that he is alone, but that he is not psychologically equipped to be alone. That he will disappear within the existential chasm.

  What’s happened? Any, any explanation would dam the panic…I struggled to be objective… An enormous isolation and loneliness, a sensation not of being observed but of being ignored, totally abandoned, was all I could separate from the confusion and fear. And this seemed all the more insidious because even now it was recognisable, I could feel my mind shoving blindly against its shape, a distended growth out of feelings I’d always had.

  This everyman quality, the camaraderie of the extreme, allows the first of the narrative tricks to be pulled. It is so easy to feel for Hobson’s plight that we like him without this likeability having to be established through act or word. And that leaves it open for the author to establish a conflict between our instinctive loyalty toward the sufferer and the kind of man Hobson may actually be. With a certain stealth, the driving question moves from ‘What would I do?’ to ‘What might Hobson do—and have done in the past?’ It’s a dark and disorienting twist. As the character moves through his broken world, we come to realise that he might be implicated in the breaking of it.

  The more Hobson’s failure and fragility is revealed, the more we come to doubt his reliability. In clumsy hands, the unreliable narrator is a cheap trick, designed more to frustrate than to manipulate. Here, it is carefully employed. The genetics laboratory in which Hobson worked, the body in the chair, the vision on a dark road, the memories of an autistic son, Hobson’s tentative attempts to piece together an explanation: none of this is incidental.

  Just as we are beginning to come to terms with the frame of reference allowed us, everything is switched again—and this requires my making one last plot revelation. Hobson is not alone. Another man has survived: Apirana Maketu, or The Maori, as our narrator uncomfortably insists upon calling him (but then, so many things about this narrator are uncomfortable). Here we are, a touch under halfwa
y through the novel, and finally the potential for external conflict presents itself. Harrison gives it free rein. Two men, a Maori and a Pakeha, a soldier and a scientist, each with no one else in the world to turn to. But that doesn’t mean they have to get along.

  There is more than a little Sartre in this scenario. The worst thing we could ever imagine is being alone, until we imagine being with somebody else. No exit, indeed. And now the range of possible explanations for what Hobson calls The Effect is compressed. Whatever the reason one man was spared must now extend to two, and yet at first glance they have nothing in common. This is a fairly archetypal working of intrigue: beginning with open possibilities, challenging the reader to design their own structure into which these clues can be fitted, and then hitting them with an impossibility. Not progress, but a promise of progress, the reminder that the writer has not forgotten his contract with you.

  The second character brings not just conflict, but an alternative viewpoint. Although there is a natural tendency for us to identify most strongly with the first character we meet in a novel, it is not inevitable. The flaws we have already seen in Hobson magnify under his response to Maketu. And therein lies perhaps the most unsettling of all the novel’s clues. For not only does the narrator’s treatment of his sole companion speak poorly of him, but the way Hobson tells it The Maori’s descriptions of himself contain the same offensive reductions and simplifications. Again we are confronted with the possibility—the only palatable possibility—of the narrator’s unreliability.

  The tension mounts. Tension between Hobson and Maketu, between fact and fiction, between cause and Effect. It is the nature of The Quiet Earth that you cannot adequately discuss the ending without saying too much. By the time the inevitable revelation arrives, we understand this story is as much an examination of John Hobson as it is an examination of the circumstances that brought his world to a standstill at 6.12 one sunny morning. We no longer like the man—we now know him to be self-obsessed, paranoid and dangerously violent—yet the intrigue remains. The story, compelling enough as a series of episodes, has one last surprise in store for us. What is it, exactly, that the reader has been witness to?

  While some people have claimed there is a deliberate ambiguity to the ending, to my mind this undervalues the author’s craft. Craig Harrison, who has been a successful playwright and published five other novels in different genres over the past forty-odd years, knows exactly what he is doing. That there is only one chilling possibility left ensures this book can be rightfully considered a classic.

  The Quiet Earth

  CHAPTER ONE

  The pull of the earth took hold of my spine, my limbs spread over space. There was the breath-beat of falling, spiralling, the air pushing hard for a moment and then letting go. The light split open my eyelids. It was brilliant, drained of colours, painful. An immense silence rushed around me. My throat was trying to make a noise, to beat it back. The light pulsed redness. Then the silence expanded.

  I was sitting bolt upright in bed breathing fast and staring at the wall. The daylight was streaming into the motel room through the slats of the blinds. I seemed to have been awake, and asleep, for ages. I lay back and remembered where I was. The silence persisted. My watch at the bedside had stopped at 6.12. Reaching out, I shook it and the second hand began flicking round again. How long had it been stopped? I got up and went to the window which looked out onto the main road; my arm moved up towards the cord of the blind.

  What?

  I paused. What was happening? The casual movement, everyday, ordinary, towards opening the blind, had been interrupted by something, by an impulse to stop, which had no sensible origin at all. It was so curious and extraordinary that I was pausing not because of the impulse itself but in a conscious effort to find a reason for it. But I had forgotten. My mind seemed to resist. The silence pressed in thickly. It was exactly like forgetting the name of a place you’ve visited dozens of times; it’s just on the tip of your mind but you can’t find it. You stop and think, and when there’s no answer you go on. Perhaps, later, you will know.

  Then I reached up and opened the blind to the enormous light.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was still early; possibly, to judge by the sun, about 8.30 am. I looked out at the grass and the road beyond. The air was clear and bright with the promise of another fine summer day. All was quiet. The scene was cut into strips by the slats of the venetian blinds, and I pulled the cord to alter the angle of the slats, looking up, ahead, and down. Perhaps it really was only 6.15; nobody had woken up yet. Saturday morning in a small town like Thames was obviously not hectic. Good. That was why I had come to Coromandel, after all; for peace and quiet.

  I showered and dressed. The water pressure seemed weak. Only when I tried to use my electric razor did I realise that the power was off. I tried the lights, the radio, the electric hotplates on the cooker. All dead. Probably a fuse. I went out of the door at the back of the motel unit and looked around from the balcony. There was nobody below in the car park, and no sign of activity. Descending to the office I wandered around pressing buzzers, knocking on doors, shouting hello, but the whole place appeared to be deserted. Curtains and blinds were still drawn and the car park was full.

  Curiouser and curiouser: I realised that in all the time since I had been awake, not a single vehicle had gone along the road, nor had there been any kind of noise. Even a sudden breeze rustling the leaves of a tree in the garden of one of the houses behind the car park startled me, and I went and looked over into the garden. Nobody was there. There’s a clock in my car, I thought, I’ll check the time.

  I unlocked the car door. The hands of the dashboard clock stood fixed at 6.12. For a moment the breath went dry in my lungs. I slid into the car, slammed the door shut defensively, put the key in the ignition, drew out the choke, turned the key, revved the engine, reversed, then into first, accelerator down. The Marina skidded on loose stones and swept along the drive away from the motel. The clock had started again. I slowed at the end of the drive but there was no traffic and in a few seconds I was on the main road towards the centre of town.

  All this happened very quickly. Because of the sight of the clock. It was impossible. What am I doing? Why am I driving into Thames at about 6.30 am, or whenever, because of a clock? And a power cut?

  The first wave of panic subsided, then thickened hard as the total emptiness of the town slid past, stared back, blank. In the middle of the main street there was a car stalled at an intersection. I slowed down, drew over to the kerb and stopped fifty metres away. When I cut the engine off, the silence fell around the car like a solid thing, shutting against me. I tapped the dashboard to make a sound. My ears seemed suffocated. Reaching out I shoved the plastic indicator stick on the steering column to sound the horn, but with the panic still trembling inside me I pushed the wrong one and the windscreen washers spurted two jets of water across the glass. Cursing, I jabbed the other control and the horn bayed into the deserted street so loudly that I let go immediately and it stopped. The water dribbled and sagged down the windscreen, chopping the view of the shops, pavement, shadows, sun, car, car’s shadow, into distorted slivers, glistening even clearer. It was all very real and present.

  I got out of the car, letting the door swing back and slam shut with a metallic clang which followed the noise the horn had made, spreading away along the street in both directions and being echoed and absorbed as it went.

  The sun was now quite hot. I stood on the tarmac looking at the car in the middle of the road, not wanting to go any closer. It was a red Datsun. If it had been left suddenly, wouldn’t the doors be open? What the hell. I walked up to it and stared in cautiously, shading my eyes. There was nobody there. I opened the driver’s door. Ignition still switched on; petrol run dry; batteries weak. The gear was in neutral; he’d stopped at the intersection. The handbrake wasn’t on. It was very hot inside the car and I lifted myself off the edge of the seat and stood up to test the door, to see if it
would close by itself if left. It stayed open. As I leaned on the door I looked down at the driver’s seat and saw the seatbelt, still fastened, stretching loosely across the seat. I slammed the door and stepped back several paces. My first instinct was to run for the Marina and get away. But I stopped the impulse. Many people never use their seatbelts. They leave them strewn all over and never notice. Fastened? Yes, why not? People are strange. Do odd things. There are always explanations. What, then? For all this? A set for a film? An experiment? It’s a Civil Defence exercise, and nobody told me. I’m a stranger; they forgot. The real thing? A disaster, everyone gone, evacuated, they forgot me. Lots of explanations.

  Back at my car I revved the engine loudly and then set off to drive round the town. No signs or clues at the police station or post office. No people anywhere, not even in the residential streets. The houses were all closed and shuttered. Empty cars stood in odd places across some roads. I checked two or three, then drove past the others. The sound of my horn in the streets brought no response. I accelerated back to the main street and parked where I had stopped before. I would have to find a transistor radio. There was an electrical goods shop nearby.

  The door was locked. In the window a digital clock showed 06.12. My eyes flicked away quickly from it. I went back, got a tyre lever from the car and smashed the glass door. The noise was a shattering attack on the emptiness. It roused nothing. I waited, listening. There were not even any bird or animal sounds. My feet crunched on broken glass as I stepped into the shop. And I shivered, suddenly, in the coolness.

  There was a telephone. I picked it up and listened for a dial tone but it was totally extinct. Selecting a handy portable radio I checked to see it had batteries and then switched it on and ran the dial round all the way on medium wave from 530 to 1600 kHz. There was nothing but static. With the volume up so high that the crackling and hissing sounded like the abrasions of barbed wire across heavy sandpaper, still nothing. After rechecking connections and trying again, I switched off.