The Calculations of Rational Men by Daniel Godfrey

(Self published, 2022)

Reviewed by Stuart Carter

It’s 1962, and the whole world is breathing a sigh of relief after the Cuban Missile Crisis ends peacefully—even the 500 inmates of HMP Queen’s Bench, an isolated prison in the north of England. But their relief is to be short-lived…

One December night, a thermonuclear attack is unleashed upon the UK, and the men are herded into an underground shelter beneath the prison, along with a small military detachment. The inmates are tense, the shelter is crowded, and their keepers are terrified. No one has any idea what’s happening above ground, only that the Geiger counters show deadly radioactive fallout has covered the prison and will swiftly finish anyone unlucky enough to be out there.

Are you terrified enough yet? Because things only go downhill from here in The Calculations of Rational Men.

Amidst the thugs and spivs of HMP Queen’s Bench (and that’s just the wardens!) is Dr Joseph Marr, a former GP, just beginning a sentence for murder. Or is he? Marr briefly explains it’s a stupid misunderstanding of his attempt to save a drowned woman using the new technique of CPR; but is it? Regardless of his crime, he’s the only doctor in the shelter, so the wardens and military are forced to trust him; but he may not be the only untrustworthy one.

The shelter has enough food and water—barely—to last two weeks, which is also when the radiation outside will have mostly dissipated, and it should be safe to leave the shelter. All the men have to do is wait a fortnight, all crammed together in tiny dormitories, living on a pittance of water and crackers. After that fortnight their ‘reward’ will be to return to a surface burned and irradiated by H-bombs, where their friends and family are dead, and their homes blasted to bits. Can they—should they?—hold it together in the face of Armageddon?

And then The Calculations of Rational Men takes an odd turn, leaping forwards to ‘70 years after the bombs’.

Here we meet Enola Thompson, whose mother has recently died, having instilled in her daughter a terror of nuclear war. But there hasn’t been a nuclear war.

Enola is at home, inside her own small bomb shelter, which she seldom leaves in case there’s a nuclear attack, and she is always aware of exactly how long it will take her to get back should the bombs begin to fall.

The rest of The Calculations of Rational Men jumps back and forth between Dr Marr, trapped in the nightmarish Queen’s Bench, and Enola, slowly discovering the truth behind what happened to her mother—and why she was so obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war, which is undoubtedly terrifying, but most people try not to think about it and get on with their lives.

Enola steadily untangles her mother’s history, whilst simultaneously revealing Marr’s steadily worsening situation, which, to be honest, is the more fascinating story here; but Godfrey plots his stories well enough, and the setup is sufficiently, horrifically, engaging, that I trusted him to bring both to a satisfying conclusion (which he largely does).

The writing style is functional rather than beautiful, working best in the bomb shelter where it helps to emphasise Marr’s lack of emotion and intellectual distance from the other men, as well as his unreliability as a narrator.

The Calculations of Rational Men is self-published, which does show itself in a few places, such as that odd slip mentioned earlier: introducing Enola’s story as ‘70 years after the bombs,’ when we’re clearly told at one point that Enola’s story takes place in our world in 2017, which is not 70 years after 1962. I spent a long time puzzling over the implied timeline after reading that.

Minor slips aside, The Calculations of Rational Men is both a horrible book and a terrifyingly good read.

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.