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How Does The Second Sleep End?

Finished the book but the ambiguous ending left me unsettled—was that final choice a new beginning or true damnation for the church and protagonist? Need other readers' interpretations.
2025-12-24 15:01:33
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11 Answers

Best Answer
Marlene Jandayan
Marlene Jandayan
The events at the end of The Second Sleep lead to a massive revelation of the truth to the remaining inhabitants of the world. A massive coronal mass ejection caused by a massive solar flare caused a catastrophe on a global scale that wiped out all modern technology and sealed off the world from the outside. But instead of tearing up the remaining evidence of prior centuries of knowledge that could cause problems in this new medieval society the priest at the center of the novel chooses to protect the knowledge instead. I just read The Nightmare which was good at making the idea of not being able to dream at some point in the future being terrible at making that idea feel claustrophobic and urgent and good at trying to work out why it was happening to the main character.
2026-08-02
Nathan
Nathan
A neat and tying up of all the loose ends this is not. Which is pretty much the best thing about The Second Sleep. It starts off as what looks to be a fairly straight forward ecclesiastical mission with Fairfax. But a twist in one of the 'relics' from the old world being a relic from our own world was a wonderful surprise. But the twist in the way that Fairfax finds out the truth is a whispered betrayal in a study. Where Fairfax realizes that the church have been telling him a pack of lies for years, and he is cool with it. The book is a pessimistic read, in that even when given the chance to learn from past mistakes, the power structures of the world will find a way to suppress the truth. A very admiring, yet also very frustrated read. Just as I imagine Harris intended.
2025-12-26
Stella
Stella
The end of ‘The Second Sleep’ by Harris is very haunting and surreal. Fairfax after discovering the ruins of their once great civilization chooses to be complicit in their fate instead of trying to stir up the population to rebellion. The last line of the book is ‘he was walking into the light’. It is not at all clear that this is going to be some sort of enlightenment for him, it could be pure blindness. The twist at the end of the book re-reads the whole in a new light. Their ‘dark ages’ are our future. A very dark but intriguing look at how knowledge can be lost over time. A very odd feeling at the end of the book. Like I had glimpsed our possible future. Not a happy ending but it will stay with you.
2025-12-29
Wyatt
Wyatt
So the ending of ‘The Second Sleep’ by Robert Harris is discussed at length below. The book is written as historical fiction but morphs into a shocking post-apocalyptic revelation which would have been amazing if Harris had written it as such. However he chooses to take a more subtle route and have Fairfax discover a Coca-Cola can and suddenly realize that their ‘ancient’ predecessors were actually them. The toughest part of that discovery for Fairfax is to hide it. It is a cowardly but equally human choice. The book ends with some symbolism that I found particularly effective – the bishop’s crown made of plastic is revered by the man in the painting as sacred. He has no idea of the real origins of the symbol of his office. I had to spend hours discussing this with my book club. We couldn’t decide whether the protagonist, Fairfax, was a villain or a pragmatist. It is left for the reader to make up their own minds – it is a great ending.
2025-12-29
Gavin
Gavin
What a superb ending to Robert Harris's "The Second Sleep" – as powerful as it was to leave me gaping for days after it. I hadn’t seen that twist coming, to discover that the ‘ancient’ civilization unearthed by Harris’s cast of characters, is none other than our own long-abandoned planet after a global collapse of apocalyptic proportions.

The scene where he burns all the evidence for the ‘past’ was just quiet tragedy. It’s a comment on how the fear of progress and the fear of heresy is just what’s prevented us from growing up as a species. Harris does this in a really interesting way by making the connection between their ‘second sleep’ (the medieval practice of waking up in the middle of the night and going back to sleep) and their sleep through their own downfall as a society. It’s a really interesting and ambiguous ending and raises so many great questions about whether or not it’s worth upsetting the apple cart for the truth.
2025-12-30

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