I’ve been thinking about 28 Years Later a lot since I saw it, just over a week ago. The image that’s stuck with me, though, isn’t a rampaging horde of zombies (sorry, infected), the looming tower of bones that dominates the trailer, or even that final scene (IYKYK). Instead, it’s the truncated St George’s Cross that flies over the isolated community on Lindisfarne where a semblance of normal life has managed to continue, symbol of a very literal little England.
As you might’ve deduced from the above, the rest of this newsletter contains spoilers for the film. Scroll down to the Writing News section if you want to avoid them.
Where the previous two instalments in the series filtered the anxieties of a dying American century through a British lens, Years is very much a post-Brexit movie. We learn early on that the rage virus has been eradicated from mainland Europe and the UK quarantined. The isolationism of the islanders is difficult not to read as another layer of metaphor. Though cut off from the mainland by water except at low tide, they’ve also erected heavy gates, and those who leave the island do so with dire warnings that there will be no rescue should they get into trouble.
There’s a deftness to the way the island community is sketched out that felt very real to me. The village isn’t without its charms. Not only is it a refuge of safety from the virus, it’s close-knit, homespun, communal—the kind of bucolic alternative to city living that might equally represent an eco-friendly utopia or a retreat from the unfamiliar Other by those who like to spout nonsense about metropolitan ‘no-go zones’. It could easily be seductive.
But there are hints at a darker side, too. Not a Wicker Man style darker side (though the film often gestures at the imagery of folk horror, it stays away from its narrative conventions), but the kind of darkness that already lurks beneath the surface of ordinary British society. When our young protagonist, twelve-year-old Spike, is taken on his first trip to the mainland by his father, he’s overcome by fear. Though he’s normally a good shot with bow and arrow, his hands shake. He barely makes a single hit.
But Jamie’s blustering masculinity won’t allow him to admit the truth—or the possibility that he made a mistake in taking such a young kid into a dangerous situation. Instead, he struts around in front of the other islanders, boasting of his son’s prowess, while Spike hovers awkwardly on the periphery. Here is the survivalist fantasy of the apocalypse as macho proving-ground, rendered in the language of the pub bore—and never mind if the reality doesn’t live up to it. The evening then turns into a drunken communal singalong. The song is “Delilah”.
Murder ballads and machismo, though, are no more the real villains of the film than the infected are. Spike’s mother, Isla, suffers from an unidentified illness that confines her to bed with painful migraines, causes confusion and mood swings. There’s nobody on the island with the medical know-how to help her. But on his trip to the mainland with Jamie, Spike spots a plume of smoke from a fire. We learn later that the keeper of this flame is Dr Kelson, a former medical man who the islanders believe has gone insane.
Spike, though, wants desperately to help his mother, and sets out on a quest to find the doctor. When we finally encounter him, Kelson is no maniac. His life, to the islanders, is strange and dangerous, but he has held onto something perhaps more precious than normality: a compassion and respect for the humanity of even the infected that is sincere and deeply touching.
In a flashback to the moment the islanders decided Kelson was insane, we learn that this was a split-second, emotional assumption. They saw something they didn’t understand and ran. That this knee-jerk reaction has become received wisdom illustrates one of the logics of bigotry—that if something gives you the ick, there’s no need to examine the facts or listen to the experts. Shout loud enough, and your disgust will become the truth.
It's too late for Isla to be saved. Even if Kelson had the equipment to save her, her cancer has metastasized and begun to affect her brain. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes, Isla says that she already knew, really, what was wrong with her. She just needed somebody else to say it, to affirm the truth. Kelson isn’t able to preserve Isla’s life, but he is able to give her a measure of dignity and a say in how it ends. The islanders, by looking away from the problem, only prolonged her suffering.
The movie certainly has things to say about isolationism, then—but at heart it’s a coming-of-age tale, and is concerned with the way to growth, which is through facing uncomfortable truths and other ways of being instead of shutting them out.
Seeing it at this point in my writing process felt serendipitous. Earlier this year I finished drafting my own piece of island horror, and I’m preparing to go back to it and begin edits. In many ways, it’s a very different story from 28 Years—a historical weird/gothic piece set on Flat Holm, in the Bristol Channel, at the very end of the nineteenth century—but I still found resonances in the film.
The novella's protagonist, Margaret, is a nurse at the isolation hospital which opened on Flat Holm in the 1890s. The island may be a space of isolation, but for her, it’s also a place of escape from her very own stifling small community. The hospital is within sight of Cardiff Docks, one of the busiest ports in the UK at the time, but is used to isolate patients with suspected cholera. At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of disease as a kind of invasion into the body politic was everywhere. It combined anxieties about the end of the British Empire and British supremacy on the world stage, with fears of urbanisation and the pace of modern life.
But Margaret ultimately finds herself witness to a very different kind of epidemic—and undergoes a transformation that might not be all bad.
Hopefully you can see the points of comparison. 28 Years is messy and very clearly a ‘Part 1’, but it’s also immensely compelling, and I’m glad I saw it. I think it’s going to help sharpen up my thinking about island horror, and after watching, I’m more excited to get back to writing it.
Writing News
I sent the manuscript of my current novel project off to first readers earlier in the month, and some comments are starting to trickle back. There’s been quite a bit of swearing. I think that’s a good sign?
Otherwise, I’m plugging away on research and edits, so while it feels like I’m doing a lot, there’s not currently much to report on the publishing front. I have also outlined a couple of possible next projects and sent them off to my agent for her thoughts, so I’m looking forward to starting something new in the not-too-distant future.
What I've been reading
I suffer from terrible hype-aversion, so I stayed away from Madeline Miller's
The Song of Achilles
for years -- but it's this month's pick for my LGBTQ+ book club, and I have to admit I'm enjoying it quite a lot so far. It does a good job of maintaining the balance between accessibility and a fairly alien, mythic worldview -- an authorial trick that's much harder than it looks.
What I've been watching
The anime series
Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku
is also set on a mysterious island (seeing a theme here?). Set in Edo Japan, the series follows a group of criminals and the samurai sent to keep them in line as they search for the elixir of life, encountering strange, murderous creatures and a boatload of plant horror along the way. It's good fun (at least, if your definition of 'fun' is similar to mine...).
What I've been listening to
Not much new, this month, but I have been picking up a few episodes of speculative fiction podcast,
A Meal of Thorns
, which is a sort of companion to the Ancillary Review of Books and foregrounds thoughtful, critical discussion -- including, most recently, an excellent episode on Olga Ravn's
The Employees
.
That's all from me for now. 'Til next time, I'm off to drink some iced tea in a darkened room.
JL