'48

Despite the setting being a departure for Herbert, several of the early scenes feel oddly familiar, with one sequence where Hoke is forced to enter a body-strewn Underground, before fleeing from fire and rats into a secret bunker, seeming to have been lifted straight from the pages of Domain. Elsewhere ’48 details a simple story of Hoke’s cat-and-mouse battle with the Blackshirts. Despite a few good set-pieces and Herbert taking the reader on a virtual tour of London’s landmarks, the action soon gets very samey, with only Hoke’s encounters with some other survivors breaking the repetition.

This lack of variety is ‘48’s biggest failing – the novel starts with Hoke fighting Blackshirts in the ruins of London and ends with Hoke fighting Blackshirts in the ruins of London some 300 odd pages later – rather than build up the storyline by starting with Hoke’s life before the virus broke out, instead Herbert drops the reader right into the thick of things with the apocalypse already 3 years in the past. It makes for an exciting beginning, but Herbert has nothing new to offer for the rest of the novel, just more of the same. The Bloodeath virus itself is none too convincing either, as on the one hand it has to be fast acting enough for Herbert to fill London’s streets with eerie corpses, yet it also has to be so slow to react in others that a band of sick Blackshirts are still conveniently around 3 years later to threaten Hoke.

Ultimately ’48 has some good action sequences, including a very James Bond-ian finale on Tower Bridge, but little to offer in terms of plot or character. As such ’48 would seem to be the perfect basis for a two-hour Hollywood action movie, but it’s just too thin a story to work as a novel. It’s nice to see Herbert trying his hand at other genres occasionally, but ’48 is a long way off of the author’s best form.