Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

From the author's website:

"Susan Cooper set this 1964 sci-fi thriller in an Orwellian future of 1980. England is under the power of a lunatic Prime Minister Mandrake, who creates a planned society of isolation that forces people back to their place of origin. Standing against his insanity is anthropologist Dr David Queston, an expert on man and “the tyranny of place.” England has sunk into a nightmare of destitute walled cities filled with a hysterical public overcome with fear; unexplained natural disasters add to Queston’s suspicions that the earth itself is rebelling against man’s attachment to the earth and nuclear presumptions. It is up to Queston and his fellow rootless travelers (including the beautiful actress Beth) to challenge authority and restore hope for the future."

Genres: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fiction, Fantasy

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Susan Cooper's latest book is the YA novel "Ghost Hawk" (2013)

Susan Cooper was born in 1935, and grew up in England's Buckinghamshire, an area that was green countryside then but has since become part of Greater London. As a child, she loved to read, as did her younger brother, who also became a writer. After attending Oxford, where she became the first woman to ever edit that university's newspaper, Cooper worked as a reporter and feature writer for London's Sunday Times; her first boss was James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

Cooper wrote her first book for young readers in response to a publishing house competition; "Over Sea, Under Stone" would later form the basis for her critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence, "The Dark Is Rising." The fourth book in the series, "The Grey King," won the Newbery Medal in 1976. By that time, Susan Cooper had been living in America for 13 years, having moved to marry her first husband, an American professor, and was stepmother to three children and the mother of two.

Cooper went on to write other well-received novels, including "The Boggart" (and its sequel "The Boggart and the Monster"), "King of Shadows", and "Victory," as well as several picture books for young readers with illustrators such as Ashley Bryan and Warwick Hutton. She has also written books for adults, as well as plays and Emmy-nominated screenplays, many in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn, whom she married in 1996. Hume Cronyn died in 2003 and Ms. Cooper now lives in Marshfield MA. When Cooper is not working, she enjoys playing piano, gardening, and traveling.

Recent books include the collaborative project "The Exquisite Corpse Adventure" and her biography of Jack Langstaff titled "The Magic Maker." Her newest book is "Ghost Hawk."

Visit her Facebook pages: www.facebook.com/SusanCooperFanPage
www.facebook.com/GhostHawkBySusanCooper

Reviews

[Stella Perrett]

This is one of Coopers earliest works, maybe the earliest, and is out of print. I managed to get a copy through an out of print book service for £30.
It creepily describes our current state of lockdowns and regional lockdowns by nearly 50 years, and our withdrawal from Europe. Cooper presciently names China as the third of the great world powers who are seen as an existential threat to Britain. ( The others are obviously US and Russia, she was writing in the Cold War days).
The story is folk-magic-science fiction, it's easily equal to The Dark is Rising in it's very real sense of claustrophobic fear. Mandrake is a faceless civil servant who grows in power over several years of passing increasingly authoritarian laws. He somehow releases what the journalist in Penda's Fen calls " The Primal Genii of the Earth".
In our current situation, Mandrake's medieval city-state run by regional Barons, with the general population brainwashed into acceptance, is worryingly familiar. Everyone stays indoors, observes curfews, receives low quality government food parcels!
The story is told by an academic who travels the world for his anthropology work, thinks of himself as a global citizen, and is somehow immune from the place-contagion Mandrake has unleashed. Try and obtain a copy of this book!

[Paul Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Penguin Books] (1966). SB. 237 Pages. Purchased from Goldstone Books.

Another title bought on the sole basis of its cover (Michael Busselle). Jules Burt flashed a copy on his wonderful YouTube channel and I was instantly drawn in.

A mix of science fiction and fantasy with post apocalyptic survival, dystopia, inter/intra national migration control, environmentalism, romance etc. muddled together… nothing is satisfactorily explored.

The novel’s adeptly written and I remained intrigued; emerging frustrated - it kinda fizzles out with a stash of open ends.

Almost excellent.

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1960s novel is Cooper's first and is aimed at adults, before she gained more success with her The Dark is Rising series for teens/YA. The premise is interesting and quite topical in some ways, because it shows Britain becoming turned inward and obsessed with the notion of each inhabitant belonging to an ancestral home which excludes outsiders, a process taken to the extreme by the end of the story, so that new towns stand empty, and inhabitants of even large cities will not tolerate anyone from outside.

The person who directs this is the Mandrake of the title, a politician who climbs to power and in the course of implementing this segregation, apparently triggers off the non scientific aspect of the story, a brooding intelligence in the Earth itself, which decides it has had enough of humans and the nuclear threat they pose to the planet. However, this is portrayed at a distancing remove because the book follows the character of Queston, obviously named symbolically, who is an anthropologist and the first to suspect the planet's animosity. His work is buried by the authorities who steal the manuscript of his book, so he is unable to warn the public of the threat. Due to his globetrotting past, he is less affected by the mindcontrolling aspects of the force he has identified, although eventually he succumbs to the hostile emanations that keep people away from population centres where they don't have roots.

I found the story rather dragged out because once the authorities force Queston to become a wanderer and then start pursuing him because of Mandrake's obsession that Queston's ideas are messing up his own grand plan, he drives around the country meeting various other misfits, one of whom becomes a fairly cardboard love interest, being pursued and never becoming a real agent in the story. When it seems that he might finally be going to achieve something near the end, it is the Earth force that steps in instead. It therefore comes across as a meandering and rather unsatisfactory tale. There are some incidents where it becomes more interesting, for example, when Queston, his girlfriend Beth, and an American journalist they join up with, see what a deprived and precarious life is led within one of the enclaves, and if the story had focused more on that, it would not have been a rather pointless runaround.

[Cary Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

So let's get the plot out of the way first: Professor Queston, an anthropologist, has spent years away from his native Britain studying stone age tribes in Brazil; in particular, a tribe that has a deep, inexplicable, and religious attachment to a series of caves in a mountainside. On one of his rare trips back to England, Queston finds that his native land is under the sway of Mandrake, a minister in the government in the newly-formed Ministry of Planning. Queston has a brief and unexpected meeting with Mandrake, who seems strangely interested in Queston's research in Brazil. Flash forward a few years and Queston returns to England to find that Mandrake is now the de facto ruler of Britain and has launched the country on a bizarre and quasi-fascist policy of forcing the population to relocate to the places in England where they were originally born. England has become an impoverished dystopia with most of the population walled up in major towns and cities. Queston, who is rootless, finds himself on the run and roaming the "deadlands," the areas outside the control of the Ministry of Planning. In addition, the country is being plagued by mysterious earthquakes and tsunamis. The purpose behind these policies and disasters is rather muddled, but it seems that the Earth, (it's postulated by Queston) is actually a sentient being, and is striking back at humans for using the atom bomb. Mandrake believes that if people move to where they have the greatest psychological attachment, a sense of home and belonging, the Earth will be appeased. I think.

The whys and wherefores of what's happening in this novel are its weakest element. The finale doesn't clear things up, and, if anything, it just muddies the water. Is the Earth the bad guy? Does Mandrake have some strange psychic hold over England? It's all a bit sketchy. In this regard, and in other respects, Mandrake feels very much like a Dr Who or Quatermass story, and certainly Queston's name is almost a joking amalgam of those two characters names. Queston even gets a companion, Beth, who also becomes his love interest. Queston actually does very little in the novel except witness events, but he's a stalwart and agreeable character.

What the novel lacks in coherence, it makes up for in atmosphere. Combining elements of 1984 and tropes from John Wyndham's SF novels, and with an added hint of folk horror, Cooper creates a dread-soaked and demented England that's been brainwashed and bullied into believing happiness only comes from insularity and xenophobia. Here's a minor character's view of the changes:

"I never voted for this government, I'll tell you that, but they've done well. Could have pranged everything, but they've given us peace and quiet. Keep ourselves to ourselves, that's all we've ever wanted. All that Common Market nonsense--England's an island, isn't it?"

A political leader persuades people to take a self-evidently disastrous course of action, like, say, Brexit? Pure science fiction. This was Cooper's first novel, and while its internal logic is flawed, the world-building and atmosphere are excellent. Not a must-read, but a fascinating and well-written curiosity.

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Susan Cooper is better known as an author of dark children's fiction, MANDRAKE, her first novel, is purely an adult read. And I'm astonished that it's long forgotten today, because it carries on the trend in excellent in postwar British science fiction, depicting a dystopian future every bit as good as the ones you'll find in Orwell's 1984 or Wyndham's DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. The story, which subtly unfolds at its own pace, involves the Earth rising up after having had enough of mankind, although the physical action is more about a government whose new policies spell disaster for the British. There's thinly-disguised satire aimed at the Tories, xenophobia and tower blocks, but above all that a quite wonderful sense of slow-burning dread throughout, a real taste of the uncanny as the inexplicable happens. The action is expertly described, the characters real, and the suspense never ends.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Before Susan Cooper (1935-) published Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) (the first in The Dark is Rising Sequence), her only SF novel for adults Mandrake (1964) hit the shelves. Both novels were started in her free time while she worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times under Ian Fleming, of James Bond [...]"

[Andi Chorley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent debut novel by Susan Cooper who wrote The Dark Is Rising series which I loved as a teenager. A dystopic tale with resonances to the present day and nativist appeals by populist politicians.

[D.S. Cohen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written, but there are a heck of a lot of seeds that never grew into anything.

[Cheryl]

Not Found. Popular Author. jo walton calls this a 'cozy catastrophe' which may be akin to 'optimistic post-apocalyptic'

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really science fiction but a fine thriller nonetheless.