Relevant

The Hopkins Manuscript,” newly reissued, recounts a global catastrophe through the sometimes humorous perspective of an ordinary Englishman.

[Riddley Walker](https://amzn.to/3kQLE8c)” (1980), England is literally bombed back into the Dark Ages; in Richard Jefferies’s “ [After London](https://amzn.to/3Yiz6oq)” (1885), feudal courts exist, surrounded by menacing wilderness; and in J.D. In “The Hopkins Manuscript,” he shows he is as adept at description as at dialogue. Flidale, the carrier, in his cottage by the bridge — a moment’s pause to watch the boys at football on the green — the country sounds, the smell of the hay — the peaceful stroll home and chat with old Barlow at my gate; the last hour of my life — the last hour in which I was to know the meaning of repose.” Sherriff (1896-1975) was severely wounded in World War I and first gained fame as the author of the celebrated antiwar play “Journey’s End” (1928). Besides novels and dramas, he became best known as the screenwriter for such films as “The Invisible Man” (1933) and “Goodbye, Mr. Instead of destroying us, the moon would deliver us forever from greed and cruelty and war by frightening us into an everlasting thankfulness.” Consider, for example, Hopkins’s description of his Uncle Henry, who, before retirement from the Office of Works, “had done much to add dignity and decorum to the public spaces of London, and it was through his untiring endeavors that the hands which pointed to the public conveniences in Hyde Park had a short length of sleeve and white cuffs painted onto their naked wrists.” That’s definitely worthy of the Grossmiths’ immortal Mr. It can almost seem so, yet overall the humor of its leisurely first half more closely resembles that of George and Weedon Grossmith’s dryly comic Victorian bestseller, “ [The Diary of a Nobody](https://amzn.to/3RrfBYA)” (1892). Having learned at a closed-door meeting of the British Lunar Society that the moon will strike the Earth on May 3, 1946, Hopkins has been pledged to secrecy to prevent nationwide panic. To the scholars of Addis Ababa, hungry for knowledge of the past, the “Hopkins Manuscript” turns out be “a thin, lonely cry of anguish from the gathering darkness of a dying England” but — unfortunately — “infinitely pathetic in the pitiful little conceits and self-esteem of its author.” A former schoolmaster who, because of a small inheritance, has been able to retire to the country, Hopkins is vain, envious of others, accustomed to his domestic comforts and utterly self-centered. For years, however, archaeologists of the Royal Society of Abyssinia have been seeking artifacts to help “reconstruct the lost glory of the ‘white man.’” During one expedition to what was once London, a young scientist, out gathering brushwood, unearths a small vacuum flask, inside which is a handwritten account of life in a small village called Beadle during the days leading up to the lunar catastrophe.