Two ideologically opposed diarists tell the story of how a constitutional crisis, an oil blockade and a stock-market crash brought society to its knees.
"The first thing to get out of the way is that there was no meteor.
No alien invasion.
The polar ice caps didn’t melt."
The Natural Order of Things is a literary novel deeply rooted in the financial, political and ideological crises of early 21st Century society. It asks whether that feeling, deep in your gut, that civilization is on the brink of a major catastrophe is just you being neurotic or is genuinely a sign of the times. What if the oil does stop flowing westward and what if the next foundering bank falls so hard that it takes every other financial institution with it? What if money becomes meaningless, and the empty rhetoric of society collapses under the weight of sudden self-realization - not in ten years or twenty years, but the year after next?
And what if the only records of what happens are the journals of two people trying to make sense of a world in which none of the old rules remain – a middle-aged evangelical Christian determined to re-establish her idea of order, and a young philosophy professor happy to make the most of his new circumstances?