Down to a Sunless Sea
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This article discusses the book about a planeload of people during the ultimate worldwide disaster.
David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea explores the issues involved in a world without energy, gone mad, that crosses the line into nuclear holocaust.
The story is told in the first person singular by Jonah Scott, a British pilot who has arrived in New York on his regular flight from London. The United States has collapsed into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world country, the reason being that the U.S. used up all of its oil reserves - including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve - and became unable to buy more oil. Britain has held onto its oil and as a result that country is more-or-less "normal", i.e. civilized.
Jonah has to negotiate with a taxicab driver to take him and his girlfriend Kate, one of the stewardesses, into a secured apartment that a friend of his allows him to use when he's in New York, rather than even think of attempting to walk through New York City. The city has essentially descended into the status of a bombed-out London or Berlin during World War II, Saigon after South Vietnam fell, or current-day Beirut, as warring gangs fight for turf in a city without energy or fuel.
At the apartment, Jonah cooks dinner for himself and Kate with food he brought with him all the way from London, which is ridiculously normal in comparison to this place of horror. Two men, pretending to be police, attempt to break in to steal food, and as one of them is about to kill the security guard and maintenance man who was called when they arrived (and killed the other fake police officer before he could kill Jonah), Jonah kills the remaining one.
Jonah's co-pilot later arrives with his girlfriend, a resident of New York, having gotten the cab driver that brought Jonah earlier to take him there. Jonah and the co-pilot decide, despite the extreme penalties involved, to sneak the co-pilot's lady and the superintendent who saved Jonah's life, on the plane with them and take them along to London, rather than have them continue to stay in the hellhole of New York. They are aided by a military man at the airport who is grateful for a favor Jonah did for him earlier.
The book then shows the desperation and fear of the world as global politics change with the U.S. essentially out of the picture. The use by Israel of a nuclear weapon upon an Arab country in retailation for its poisoning of Israel's water supply, triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust while the plane is enroute to London. Unable to go on to Europe due to the fallout from the bombs that have just fallen, it also is unable to go back to the United States as New York City has also been nuked. The crew desperately attempt to find a place to land their plane of what may be the last surviving people on earth.
The title of the book is from one of the lines of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge.