Can the Environment be Saved? Post-Apocalyptic Children’s Novels of the 1980s

Abstract

Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence (1985) and Robert Swindells’ Brother in the Land (1984) are turning points in the representation of the impact of the apocalypse in children’s literature. Both novels are set during and in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. Changes to genetic structure alter the interdependence between the human and the non-human and each novel addresses the possibility, or otherwise, of human life continuing after the final pages. Children of the Dust follows fifty-five years in the lives of one family who are split up when the bombs drop; ultimately the nuclear devastation leads to the beginning of a new society in which those who reach an underground bunker have to accept those who live above ground. In contrast, Brother in the Land follows teenagers Kim and Danny for several years as they try to exist in a newly-destroyed northern town and ends with them uncertain as to how much longer they can survive.