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One of the most dexterous words in English literature is things. Being flexible and useful is the entire point of a word like things, of course, but still: watch it sing in a book like I Capture the Castle or Cold Comfort Farm. Shall I clear away the tea things? That, I would argue, is the Early 20th Century English Novel Sentence par excellence. I didn't even look it up: I'm just assuming that Dodie Smith and Stella Gibbons will have both landed on it through sheer cultural resonance. How could they not? There will be tea so there will be tea things, and it's only polite to ask when you're thinking about getting rid of them, isn't it? And look what the word things is doing in that sentence! It is creating a friendly out-of-focus clutter of everyday objects, a nimbus of impedimenta. It is suggesting that even the most mindless of routines like serving a pot of Earl Grey will have a quiet exactitude to it, often requiring the use of tools. Life is ritual. Brew up.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the latest narrative ramble from The Chinese Room (and Sony's Santa Monica Studios) does not quite belong to this English tradition, but slots comfortably into another - the tradition of Wyndham and Quatermass, where things is apt to take on prickly aspects of the uncanny. What do you think those things were? What could those things want? No matter. In its sumptuous and evocative treatment of a very English apocalypse, Rapture has plenty of room for the original things of Smith and Gibbons as well: for the chummy muddle of life and its many attendant bits and pieces that is so much a part of Middle England's conception of itself that it survives even when most of humanity has been swept away.
And it spoils nothing, hopefully, to say that this is the big theme of Rapture: what remains when we are gone? What were we about, and what was the point of the time we had? Can we hope to be more than the things we gathered around us when we lived? To examine these vital questions, The Chinese Room offers up an entire village, breezy and blooming and delivered in gorgeous brackeny fidelity by CryEngine tech, and then it empties it of people - superficially at least. This is post-event territory, and the event must have been awful. Where is Everybody? They've gone to the Rapture. Let's wander around and try to decide what that means exactly.
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