2.0 KiB
[RT] Malevil, by Robert Merle
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Author: u/Rangi42 *
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URL: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Malevil
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Score: 5
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Created: 2014-08-05T02:20:37
Post:
Comments:
u/Zephyr1011 [+3] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (8 hours later)
Would you mind just giving a short summary about why this is rational?
u/Rangi42 [+3] (9 hours later)
Emmanuel Comte is a school headmaster turned rancher in the rural village of Malejac, France. He uses his unexpected inheritance from his late uncle to purchase the titular Malevil, an English castle from the Hundred Years War neighboring his uncle's ranch. ...
His childhood friends stop by on Easter Sunday, 1977 to discuss local politics turning in their favor and end up tasting wine in the castle cellars.
Meanwhile, World War III happens.
Throughout the story Emmanuel acts in a rational manner to solve problems, or notes in hindsight when he did not do so (for instance during the initial shock as the world is practically destroyed). The people left alive in the castle don't have overwhelming resources, but they use what they do have intelligently and make plans to acquire other things they need.
I found Malevil to be a sort of reconstruction of feudal society after A Connecticut Yankee deconstructed it. Here is a group of modern people stuck in a medieval-ish environment, but they are farmers not engineers, reproducing technologies like the telegraph and steamship would not be possible for them. Instead, the ways they survive and prosper tend to justify the feudal pattern of a single lord who provides security in exchange for labor, and of a shared religion uniting a small community. However, they don't get stuck in a feudal system for its own sake; where modern ideas are actually useful, they keep them, (like democratic voting, treating women as people, and not having the clergy and nobles oppress the peasantry).