Also the story of ‘hero’ James Rivers is very thin – he spends most of the novel being slowly convinced of the reasons behind the disasters sweeping the Earth, before flying off to Scotland to have the plot explained to him by some wise old hermit on a hill. Throughout there is no chance of anyone actually being able to avert the disasters, so the characters just sort of passively drift through the novel (at one point Herbert has Rivers frantically attempting to tell the authorities of the explanations he’s discovered for what’s happening, but as they cant actually do anything about it it seems a rather pointless exercise). The closest the novel gets to some actual drama is when Rivers has to protect some psychic twins – the first of a new post-apocalyptic generation - from an opposing force, but it’s too little, too late.

James Herbert obviously had his heart in the right place when writing Portent, as with it’s story of a vengeful ‘Mother Earth’ this is Herbert’s big environmental message book, but unfortunately it fails to engage the reader as a piece of dramatic storytelling. Probably his least enjoyable novel, Portent is for Herbert completists only.