#BlogTour ‘A New Dark Age’ by Ross Patrick

About the book…

When the collapsing began, in a system where scarcity was a commodity, there was always a need for the unemployed, the homeless and the hungry. When most people could no longer afford consumer goods, there were riots. The rulers called it an attack on democracy.

The riots were met with militarised, armoured police. With falling tax revenues, companies took over financing the police, so the police increasingly functioned as capitalism’s own Praetorian Guard; sometimes supporting rival business leaders, sometimes bringing about their demise, and all the while living standards fell and the state started to crumble.

For Esme Sedgebrook, growing up in the provinces, there is no future other than an arranged marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, fleeing to join the uprising is as much about personal transformation as it is political.

My thanks to Literally PR for the blog tour invite, and publishers Rebel Fiction and Brown Dog Books, for my gifted paperback review copy of ‘A New Dark Age-A Reckoning’ by Ross Patrick which is available now.

This novel is a dystopian one with eerie echoes back form the time it is set in, 2061, and now. The experiences of the past 2 years have not only widened the gap between the haves and have nots-the decimation of the supermarket stocks, wielding of privilege, one rule for them and one for us has highlighted, like never before, the disdain which those in power have for those who are not, and yet who actually put them there.

The situation that main character, and through whose eyes we see this near future version of the UK, Esme is living in, is paradoxically very medieval whilst the surroundings are recognisable as run down versions of the cities we know.

People who don’t live in London, the aspirational homestead and secure heartland of the UK, live in outposts, or villages, where they live by their means, returning to a more natural, down to earth manner of life. It includes a return to using natural remedies for medicine, and a sense of boundaries and borders where they are kept in line by the thought of ‘Roamers’, bands of nomads who are not allowed inside these towns or villages, and attack the lonely travellers they come across on the road.

An allegory for succumbing to the 21st century malaise, ‘Falling Sickness’, the catastrophic disease which brought about the down fall of ‘society’ as we know it, symbolises the bridge between the now and then of 2021 Britain, and 2061.

Yet there is hope. A preacher, cleverly named Joan Bell, and a Welsh couple, are travelling the countryside as groups of dissenters, gathering and mobilising those, who to paraphrase the seminal movie Network, are ‘mad as hell and not going to take it any more.’

That it is a Welsh couple is absolutely natural and fit, to my mind -Welsh born and bred-as our nation currently has the highest levels of children living in poverty out of the 4 UK nations, the highest number of adults on anti-depressants as well as the largest housing estate in Europe. Social deprivation and lack of life choices abound in it,I should know, we live there.

Esme , living with her father, his second wife and her young child, has little to look forward to as she basically approaches the zenith of what could be considered her ‘marriagability’.

Her mother, having run off to London, has left her without a role model during her formative teens and the one she does have, Lizzie -tellingly named for the old queen, Elizabeth II-is not much older than herself. Her father is seen as a pillar of their community, not only for carrying on in the wake of his wife’s abandonment, but also in ‘taking in’ the troubled Lizzie who id not well regarded in their small community. The double standards of not only a society which has abandoned the poor, the vulnerable and the sick, but also it’s obligations to sexual equality, stand out a mile as Esme’s father begins courting, and making Esme visit with the son of the mayor.#

With little to look forward to beyond marriage and child rearing-Esme has absolutely no say in this whatsoever-the imminent visit of the dissenters and a secret meeting which they hold near her village, is not only the first time Esme has tasted hope, it is the first time that she has seen people speak forth the things which have until now, remained firmly held behind her lips.

For the first time, she is not alone.

The reckoning is coming, those who have been previously not held to account, and used their might, money and social standing to manipulate the narrative are looking increasingly shaky at the top of their pyramid. Their position there is only granted by the weight and mass at the base of such a structure and now, well now things are going to change. Revolution is in the air and it has the unmistakable tang of copper….

I thoroughly loved this book, it holds up a mirror to not only the multiple ongoing , frankly outrageous calumny which is our current parliament, the grotesque gaps between those who control the majority of our country’s wealth -2% of the UK population hold approximately 97% of the wealth and guess where they live????- and those living in abject poverty keep widening more and more.

Civil liberties are being stripped, people are dying for lack of adequate health care, children are missing on vital safe guarding, protection, and the sheer basics of life which should be standard to all. Food, shelter and warmth are all up for grabs in this brave new world.

Riding a crest of modernity, this is an outstanding and disturbing novel-anything which challenges you to think, feel and react is, to me, always going to be outstanding-which highlights the debut of a strong new voice in dystopian fiction.

About the author…

Ross Patrick was born in the Scottish enclave of Corby in the English East Midlands. When the Steel Works started shedding jobs he moved with his family to rural Leicestershire. Introverted, Ross drifted through a grey school of tired buildings and lingering temporary classrooms to provincial universities at Leicester and then Norwich, the University of East Anglia, where he studied Literature, having previously studied History.

He then “lost a decade” working in wine retail and education before a breakdown and suicide attempt in 2014. Ross learnt that people’s sympathy for mental illness is often more generous in theory than in deed.

During a housebound recovery from depression and PTSD, initially as catharsis, he began writing more
seriously.
Ross lives quietly in a house by a stream back in the English East Midlands with his cat, Graham. He admits to disliking numbers, though this could be a reaction to his dad’s work in accounting: Life isn’t to be measured but to be experienced, though he says he’s mostly experienced his vicariously. He finds distraction in long walks, studying the philosophy of consciousness and the hope that we are all one dream experiencing itself subjectively from infinite
disassociated perspectives.

Otherwise, Ross says he suffers persistent disappointments of following Nottingham Forest, and the joyous feelgood
escapism of following Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild. He enjoys both cooking and eating Italian food, an inheritance from his mother’s family.

He is also vegetarian; Graham the cat is not. Ross believes in the collective whilst Graham is frustratingly individualistic – these differences continue to bring some small amount of tension to their otherwise companionable existence.

Twitter @rosspatrick @literallypr