Millennium

living at the end of

the world

Marina Benjamin

Picador, #12.99

AS the Millennium grinds interminably towards us, perhaps only one thing is certain. There are going to be an awful lot of books about the millennium.

Another fairly established probability is that it is going to be a season of lists and league tables. We've already had the hundred best rock albums, the hundred best movies . . .

With 18 months to go, I'd like to propose a competition that will combine the above: The Top Ten Worst Books About the Millennium. I'm afraid to say that Marina Benjamin's book is already a serious contender. This is especially disappointing in a columnist of some distinction, and given a potentially fruitful and interesting line of inquiry, that is, a comparative investigation of those cults and prophecies of the end that are paradoxically both at the centre of the Christian world view, for example, and at the far periphery of banana land.

What Ms Benjamin does here is to range over a wide, but not terribly inclusive catalogue of wished for, sudden, justifying fires, from the Jehovah's witnesses to David Koresh's collective inferno at Waco. She is best when going into some detail on the missions of Joanna Southcott in England in the early nineteenth century, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, who provide stunning proof, as she points out, that irrationality can sometimes pay. Joanna Southcott had two campaigns. In the first, during the Napoleonic War, with that convenient anti-Christ just over the water, and with social and political upheaval in the air, she spun a good line in imminent apocalypse. Ms Benjamin seems reluctant to offer anything like an analysis, which leaves her, to my mind, bereft of any meaningful perspective on our contemporary anxieties.

Most of us, these days, probably think that the world will end when it gets indiscriminately whacked by a passing asteroid. Science informs us that if we don't get whacked fatally sometime in the next four billion years, that our sun is going to cool and expand and engulf us around then anyway. What people find difficult about this is that there is no selection involved. No separation of the just and the damned. It is that winnowing which is surely the driving force behind those who call down doom upon us. Nary a one of them thinks that they will be among the chaff.

Umberto Eco has written very well and succinctly about what seems to be an infinitely repeatable scenario, from Fra Dolcino in thirteenth-century Italy, to Charles Manson in California, or the counsellor in nineteenth-century Bahia in Brazil (as wonderfully recreated in Maria Vargas Llosa's War at the End of the World.)

It's a terrific subject to which this book brings no new insight. It is not really anything to do with the year 2000, however. Not that this will do anything to stem a tide of rather half-baked publications that insist that it does. Which is not a prophecy that I look forward to seeing fulfilled.