Arrows of Desire
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Far in the future, a group of dissidents fight to rebuild Britain
It has been seven hundred years since the United Kingdom was destroyed. In the aftermath of a global cataclysm, the peoples of Europe banded together under a single flag, but the English refused to go along. Their resistance was rewarded with a genocide that wiped out half the population. The survivors resettled in North Africa, and Britain was declared uninhabitable. To celebrate the year 3000, the island is repopulated, to be ruled according to Federation law. But there are those in the underground determined to begin old battles anew.
A barbarian king rides in the forests, drinking beer and promising to resist the Federation at all costs. In the new capital, a student takes a shot at the High Commissioner, nearly killing him with an ancient weapon known as a rifle. After seven centuries of silence, the British are ready to rise again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The best-known of Household's 22 books, Rogue Male (1939), was a gripping adventure on the themes of liberty, tyranny and the ethics of political violence. He returns to those subjects in this elegant short novel. Its futuristic setting of a persistently patriotic Britain in an otherwise deracinated world allows the author to refer back to Roman Britain while commenting on the Thatcher government, the current situation in Ireland, the treatment of immigrants in England. As in the late novels of Graham Greene, the story is mostly an occasion for working out the author's ideas. Unlike Greene, though, Household has a sanguine view of humanity and he allows his different groups, poised at violence, to reach a rapprochement and engage in a dialogue that enriches all sides. Besides that, the book constitutes a tribute to England and the cantankerous British character. February 20
