When the English Fall

When the English Fall by David Williams. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2017.

Whilst a university student, I sojourned amongst the Anabaptists (mostly Mennonites, but definitely not universally Mennonite) of Virginia's northern Shenandoah Valley. I think it was my junior year that my best friend and I attended a Church whose only apparent Mennonite distinctive was that a few of the older women wore the token doily on their heads; I don't think there were even any black bumpers in the parking lot. No buggies, either, although getting stuck behind a horse and buggy on Rockingham County's winding roads was just the price of leaving Harrisonburg. I never did become an Anabaptist, but I got a sense of what they're all about.

As a presbyterian, there are few commonalities between my tradition and Anabaptism, at least with regard to surface features. Beneath that, however, both our traditions agree that discipleship is a serious matter which one ought to expect to have serious consequences for the way one lives. That belief is at the heart of When the English Fall and its fictional narrator, Jacob, a member of an Amish district in Pennsylvania. The Amish have pretty well worked out their path of discipleship, but their patterns of life are challenged and tested when civilization collapses.

In Williams's version, the dystopian tipping point comes when some freak atmospheric event acts as a massive electromagnetic pulse, effectively putting an end to all electricity and machinery. The plain folk, of course, are perfectly capable of getting by without those things which make modern civilization possible. For Jacob and his community, physical survival is never in question. Instead, their central concern is whether their culture and path of discipleship can survive in a world in which, like it or not, they are irretrievably entangled.

It's refreshing to read a novel in which prayer is a central feature. It's challenging to ask how committed one is, in practice, to following Jesus.