• Contact Us
  • Events calendar
Entering Swellesley
Pinnacle, Wellesley

The Swellesley Report

More than you really want to know about Wellesley, Mass.

  • Advertise
  • Contribute
  • Eat
  • Wellesley Square
  • School
  • Top 10 things to do
  • Embracing diversity
  • Charities/Community
  • Arts
  • Camp
  • Kids
  • Events
  • About us
  • Subscribe
  • Natick Report
  • COVID-19
  • Letters to the Editor
Needham Bank, Wellesley
Boston Sports Institute, Wellesley

Book review: When the English Fall, by David Williams

August 5, 2017 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

When the English Fall, David WilliamsThere are so many ways that the English fall in David Williams’ debut novel When the English Fall. After a solar storm takes the entire world off the power grid, their planes fall out of the sky. Their communications systems grind to a halt. There is no longer any such thing as banking, television, or attending school. From there, it’s not long before decency falls and gangs go on the attack, desperate for the food they know the Amish have stored in their well-stocked larders.

Set in Lancaster County, Ohio the self-sufficiency and industriousness of the Amish is juxtaposed with the grasshopper ways of the “English” (that’s you and me) who live lives looking “down into their rectangles of light,” living “as if “today is the only day.” Soon the grocery stores of the English empty out and they finish up the last few cans of spaghettiOs they found rolling around in their basements. Once that happens, panic sets in and even the Army and the National Guard can’t keep much more than a veneer of order.

Jacob, the novel’s narrator, and his community struggle to live their faith as they are put through a time of trial and testing. The Amish are largely considered by their neighbors to be something like angels in their midst. When a horrific In Cold Blood-like massacre occurs, the neighbors take up arms and take care of business. How long, wonders Jacob in his matter-of-fact, unflowery journal, can his community, committed to non-violence, live under the protection of “Pharaoh’s army”?

The unsettling story is revealed to us through Jacob’s eyes as he records it in his journal, his sentences and cadence as plain and straightforward as his clothes. He and his small family consisting of his wife Hannah and their two children — Jacob, sturdy, hardworking, and on the cusp of manhood, and Sadie, who suffers from seizures and has the “gift” of prophecy — have always bumped up against the English. Amish and English farms abut each other, and Jacob has frequent business dealings with Mike, a divorced dad of two with a girlfriend and a fondness for conservative talk radio, both of which rile him up to no end. Typical English. But Jacob builds the furniture and cabinetry, and Mike handles all the outside world dealings, and it pays the bills. Even the Amish have to pay property taxes and buggy insurance.

Through Jacob’s journals we see a deeply religious man and are given the great gift of seeing how such a man walks and talks and how he rails against and accepts his own flaws. Yes, Jacob “judges” the English, but his judgement takes on more of a concerned rather than a condemnatory tone. To him, the English are a people for whom “contentment seems out of…reach” as they chase lives that seem to him to be “so very hard.”

This powerful book is in a way one of the oddest in the apocalyptic genre. It hardly even fits in the category. With books such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Susan Pfeffer’s young-adult series Life as We Knew It we see how much the main characters have had to change and how they mourn their former lives as they learn to endure and simply survive.

With When the English Fall, we see how little the main characters change, even as the world around them is in utter turmoil. That the English world has ended would be incidental to the Amish, if only the English had disappeared right along with the electricity. Under such a “poof!” scenario, the Amish could have gotten along just fine. It’s the hungry, panic-stricken, desperate outsiders who are ruining it for them. Because of the terror that’s taken hold of the rest of the world, the Amish have good reason to be  scared, yet they do not devolve into terrified. They simply don’t have to dig very deep to figure out how they should proceed, because their faith, as an ever-present part of the bedrock of their lives, informs them.

That modern conveniences no longer exist doesn’t affect the Amish directly at all. As it turns out, however, those conveniences were might handy for keeping the English busy, occupied and out of the business of their gentle neighbors. It’s sort of a funny way of thinking about how the Amish “use” things like radio, television, cars, and smartphones. These toys of modern living are not things that they have much use for. After reading this book, all the doo-dads I use every day and will never willingly give up seem, in a certain light, more like trinkets to hand off to children who need to be entertained while the adults go about the important business of living. And we all know how children react when you snatch their trinkets away.

When the English Fall, David Williams
Algonquin Books, 2017
242 pages

print

Share

Filed Under: Books, Entertainment

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Linden Square, Wellesley
Write Ahead

Tip us off…

Please send tips, photos, ideas to [email protected]
Wellesley Square ad
Wellesley, Jesamondo
Sexton test prep
Feldman Law
Fay School, Southborough
Wellesley Theatre Project
Admit Fit, Wellesley
image of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
Never miss a post with our free daily Swellesley Report email
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

You can subscribe for free, though we appreciate any contribution that supports our independent journalism.

Click here to read our Natick Report

Natick Report

Events Calendar

« January 2021 » loading...
S M T W T F S
27
28
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
5
6
Thu 21

Zero Carbon Home webinar

January 21 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Tue 26

Rum tasting and history talk

January 26 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Wed 27

Online history lecture: Petticoat Whalers

January 27 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Thu 28

January 28 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Most Read Posts

  • Nearly half of Wellesley's available restaurant alcohol licenses are gathering dust
  • Natick issues boil water alert due to E. coli, some Wellesley homes affected
  • Bench at baseball field honors Wellesley's Harry Clark
  • 10 takeaways from the Town of Wellesley's FY20 annual report
  • Pinnacle Residential Properties: the concept of home & roots

Pages

  • Wellesley coronavirus (COVID-19) updates
  • Wellesley’s 7 official scenic roads
  • Wellesley, Mass., fishing spots
  • Please support our advertisers—they support us
  • Embracing diversity in Wellesley
  • Wellesley, MA Police logs
  • Wellesley Choral Society
  • Wellesley College Notable Alumnae
  • Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.
  • Wellesley outdoor art gallery
  • Wellesley restaurants offering take-out and delivery
  • Wellesley, Massachusetts restaurant — Amarin of Thailand

Recent Comments

  • Bob Brown on “I Care a Lot” movie that filmed in Wellesley making Netflix debut
  • Juli on “I Care a Lot” movie that filmed in Wellesley making Netflix debut
  • Bob Brown on “I Care a Lot” movie that filmed in Wellesley making Netflix debut
  • Russ Barbour on “I Care a Lot” movie that filmed in Wellesley making Netflix debut
  • Paul Starcevich on Wellesley loses Everett (“Eddie”) Knowles, RDF volunteer, medical miracle

Links we like

  • Great Runs
  • Jack Sanford: Wellesley's Major League Baseball Star
  • Taquitos.net
  • Tech-Tamer
  • The Wellesley Wine Press
  • Universal Hub
  • Wellesley Sports Discussion Facebook Group

Categories

  • 2021 Town Election (4)
  • Animals (377)
  • Antiques (48)
  • Art (534)
  • Beyond Wellesley (28)
  • Books (343)
  • Business (1,357)
  • Camp (1)
  • Careers/jobs (44)
  • Churches (72)
  • Clubs (207)
  • Construction (280)
  • Dump (113)
  • Education (2,878)
    • Babson College (239)
    • Bates Elementary School (14)
    • Dana Hall School (29)
    • Fiske Elementary School (6)
    • Hardy Elementary School (33)
    • Hunnewell Elementary School (34)
    • MassBay (47)
    • Schofield Elementary School (20)
    • Sprague Elementary School (19)
    • St. John School (1)
    • Tenacre Country Day School (9)
    • Upham Elementary School (30)
    • Wellesley College (598)
    • Wellesley High School (883)
    • Wellesley Middle School (195)
  • Embracing diversity (37)
  • Entertainment (722)
  • Environment (665)
  • Fashion (133)
  • Finance (12)
  • Fire (141)
  • Food (327)
  • Fundraising (559)
  • Gardens (136)
  • Government (385)
    • 2020 Town Election (47)
  • Health (736)
    • COVID-19 (133)
  • History (358)
  • Holidays (365)
  • Houses (118)
  • Humor (45)
  • Kids (814)
  • Law (3)
  • Letters to the Editor (5)
  • Media (63)
  • METCO (5)
  • Military (3)
  • Morses Pond (96)
  • Music (543)
  • Natick Report (27)
  • Neighbors (243)
  • Obituaries (58)
  • Outdoors (582)
  • Parenting (60)
  • Police (688)
    • Crime (345)
  • Politics (534)
  • Real estate (286)
  • Religion (127)
  • Restaurants (302)
  • Safety (142)
  • Scouts (1)
  • Senior citizens (107)
  • Shopping (121)
  • Sports (897)
  • STEM (104)
  • Technology (154)
  • Theatre (383)
  • Town Meeting (22)
  • Transportation (209)
  • Travel (11)
  • Uncategorized (1,205)
  • Volunteering (317)
  • Weather (161)
  • Wellesley Election 2019 (21)
  • Wellesley Free Library (258)
  • Wellesley's Wonderful Weekend (5)
RSS Feed Icon Subscribe to RSS Feed

© 2021 The Swellesley Report
Site by Tech-Tamer · Login