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The Faber Editions look has been carefully designed and lovingly overseen by Pete Adlington, with art direction from Donna Payne and much input from the editor Ella Griffiths. As Salena Godden later said in her celebration of Termush, this hypnotic novella immediately felt like ‘someone from the future screaming to us in the past. In this regard, Ballard’s novel has more in common with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), in which a party of schoolboys who descend into savagery on an uninhabited island are rescued by a Navy “trim cruiser”. The management of Termush shields the worst of what has happened in the rest of the world from the residents but, gradually, the real-life global disaster begins to creep into their lives.
The book was originally published in the author’s native Denmark in 1967 and translated into English by Sylvia Clayton in 1969.
Translated from the Danish by Sylvia Clayton and recently republished by Faber Editions as part of a series of rediscovered gems. The management has said that people can have their pictures changed if they find them unsuitable, or trade them with their neighbours if they just want a temporary rearrangement. In Termush, the sick are brought in through the back door, and kept in the library where their presence won’t disturb the guests’ dining experience. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in a world in which the gap between the poor and the wealthy is ever increasing, Termush feels disconcertingly prophetic.
Sign our petition to keep people in their homes Urgent action is needed to prevent even more people being pushed into homelessness. The end of the world in Termush comes by nuclear Armageddon, and if the fear of nuclear apocalypse has been superseded today by fears about climate change and pandemics, Holm’s vision of a world transfigured by an invisible poison is surprisingly applicable here too. I was desperate to read the book, and as I did, I picked out phrases and excerpts that had interesting visual cues and, I hoped, spoke to the feel and shape of the book as a whole.After a nuclear apocalypse the wealthy inhabitants of a hotel exit their underground bunker and begin to live their new normal lives in the hotel. Was it this warning that convinced us that the things most familiar to us would, after the disaster, be the most alien? The reconnaissance men would take with them long-range microphone equipment and every morning the management would inform us what calculations and observations they had made the previous day. It’s a series that puts the spotlight on rediscovered gems from Faber’s archive and beyond, resurrecting radical literary voices who speak to our present.
But outside their insular ecosystem is a post-apocalyptic world, with radioactive dust falling on the sculpture park and dead birds littering the gardens. The second round used a lot of photographic imagery, trying to dig into the surreal and uncanny atmosphere of the book. This preoccupation with status and privilege is reinforced by a collective horror of contamination ostensibly from the radioactive dust that pervades the air, blowing across the grounds, sparking Termush’s elaborate alarm system. It is not an exercise in nightmarish brutality like The Road (2006) or an account of humanity’s turn towards evil as the gauze of “civilization” falls away like The Death of Grass(1956).In the modern genre the ending is not final and the revelation emanates not from the heavens but the depths of the human mind. Ella Griffiths, Faber’s ‘archive mole’ (that is, classics editor), introduces the latest in the superb Faber Editions series, Sven Holm’s Termush, a Danish novella of nuclear apocalypse that had her hooked from the very first page. Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months… it was here if anywhere that the first significant event had taken place – on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hind quarter of an Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school. The characters were forced to come to terms with the idea that they are, in fact, human, just like everyone else. We did not exchange many words, but we were aware in the same moment of a shared emotion when the sea suddenly appeared, stretched out before us on our right.
It’s a fun phase where you have the idea down but you can still explore and push it, trying to maximise the impact. On our site, you can find not only book reviews but author interviews, cover reveals, excerpts from books, acquisition announcements, guest posts by your favourite authors, and so much more.
The unnamed narrator is one of a host of rich guests at Hotel Termush who, at great expense, purchased places in the residence before the apocalypse.
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