Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves

Seven Days in New Crete is the story of a week in the life of Edward Venn-Thomas, who awakens in the far future, having been magically transported there by a coven of witches.  Here he finds a peaceful and prosperous society based on five distinct castes - there is a place for everyone, and everyone is in his/her place.  War has been transformed into a robust but harmless ball game played on Tuesday afternoons.  The problem with New Crete (as the society is called) is that it contains no real challenges or dangers, and the citizens are dull, unenterprising and unimaginative.  With the arrival of Venn-Thomas, all that is about to change.

Seven Days in New Crete was one of the first sci-fi books I ever read, and for this reason it has a special place in my heart. Graves has Venn-Thomas narrate the story in first person.  The story-telling is masterful, even if the tale is a bit weak.  Graves presents us with an intriguing future society.  Like Aldous Huxley did with Brave New World, Graves questions the value of a civilisation that is conformist and risk-free, and finds that it is not one worth having.  His problem, then, is how to rehumanise such a bland and ovine society.  The answer is: by re-introducing the seven deadly sins.

Graves wrote Seven Days in New Crete in 1949.  Its original readership would have been used to a world of shortages due to the Great Depression and WWII.  For them, an imagined world of peace and plenty may have played to their desires, and yet Graves' message is that evil and conflict are necessary if humans are to flourish.  Now that we in the West live in a society of plenty rather than scarcity, we may not be so easily shocked by Graves' thesis.  The question is: do we agree with him?

Publishing details: Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves (Quartet Books, London, 1975, pp.281)