Empty World
Ratings3
Average rating4
When Neil survives a deadly plague and plunges into solitude, he must question everything in this gripping adventure from critically acclaimed Tripods author John Christopher.
Neil’s world is shattered when he and his family are involved in a horrible car accident that leaves him an orphan. He is sent to live in a small village with his grandparents, whom he loves but doesn’t really know.
Soon, a devastating illness, the Calcutta Plague, begins making the headlines. After killing thousands of people in India in just a few months, the disease begins to spread much farther, quickly sweeping across the world and eventually settling in the same village where Neil resides. The sickness is a strange one, affecting only the adults and none of the children, and soon Neil finds himself an orphan once more.
Alone, Neil travels to London in search of other survivors of the plague. There he finds a strange world of fear and suspicion, where friends can be enemies and people will do anything to survive. In this time of strife, amid the excitement and loneliness of his solitude, can Neil find a way to focus on what matters most?
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3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews
Summary
A new virus has emerged, and it proves almost universally fatal, leaving young Neil to fend for himself in a small English town.
Review
John Christopher is, generally speaking, reliable, especially in his young adult stories. That's true of Empty World as well. There's no really new ground trodden here, but it follows Christopher's reliable formula of a teen boy encountering a difficult situation with both reasonable skill and introspection. Where this book does less well is in its ending.
Christopher deals quickly with the base concept – most humans dying – though with the novel twist that they die of rapid aging. What he's more interested in is his narrator's responses to a rapidly emptying world – watching his family die, then others he's tried to care for. It's a rapidly moving story, and I wish that Christopher had spent a little more time on many of the interactions and concepts – there's a lot of good material to work with here – but I suppose that 70s-era YA books didn't lend themselves to heftier tomes. Some of the elements explored here were addressed more effectively in The Sword of the Spirits trilogy, where he had a little room to stretch out.
Even within those limits, I think Christopher could have done more with the ending. While he – somewhat unconvincingly – resolves some of the relationship issues he has set up, he ends the story still leaving a number of things hanging. It's not a terrible ending, but he wrote better ones.
All that said, it is a quick, enjoyable, and fairly undemanding read, despite touching on some weighty topics.
