conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about John, John\'s, Asia entitled The Death of Grass.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Death of Grass: A new virus strain has infected rice crops in East Asia causing massive famine; the virus is also revealed to be found in the UK but because of its selectivity does not affect the country\'s agriculture.\nAfter the introduction of a new pesticide, developed in preference to breeding resistant crops, a new, mutated virus appears and infects the staple crops of West Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley—all of the grasses (thus the novel\'s title).\nIt threatens a famine engulfing the whole of the Old World, while Australasia and the Americas attempt to impose rigorous quarantine to keep the virus out.\nThe novel follows the struggles of engineer John Custance and his friend, civil servant Roger Buckley, as, along with their families, they make their way across an England which is rapidly descending into anarchy, hoping to reach the safety of John\'s brother\'s potato farm in an isolated Westmorland valley.\nBuckley, having advance warning of the government\'s plot to hydrogen bomb major cities, alerts Custance to evacuate.\nPicking up a travelling companion in a gun shop owner named Pirrie after an attempt to procure arms, they find they must sacrifice many of their morals in order to stay alive.\nAt one point, when their food supply runs out, they kill a family to take their bread.\nThe protagonist justifies this with the belief that "it was them or us".\nBy the time they reach the valley, they have accumulated a considerable entourage as a result of their encounters with other groups of survivors along the way.\nThey find that John\'s brother is unable to let them all in to the heavily-defended valley.\nPirrie acts to prevent John leaving the group and taking only his immediate family into the valley; instead, the group takes the valley by force.\nPirrie and John\'s brother are killed; John takes possession of the valley.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Death of Grass
  The significant difference between Christopher's England and today's England, of course, is the high degree of competence in life-skills that his characters demonstrate (presumably acquired during the years of the Second World War). They know how to fix cars, navigate across open country, hunt, track, shoot, farm, establish road-blocks, and fortify a house. Given our present dependency on supermarket food, our petrol addiction and the specialization of manual skills, it's hard to think that we would react to such a crisis with the adaptability of Custance and his troops. But then perhaps this is for the good.
  When Hilda Custance was widowed in the early summer of 1933, she wrote, for the first time since her marriage thirteen years before, to her father. Their moods touched – hers of longing for the hills of Westmorland after the grim seasons of London, and his of loneliness and the desire to see his only daughter again, and his unknown grandsons, before he died. The boys, who were away at school, had not been brought back for the funeral, and at the end of the summer term they returned to the small house at Richmond only for a night, before, with their mother, they travelled north.
  His mother looked out of the window at the tarnished grimy environs of London, wavering, as though with fatigue, in the heat of the day.
  She said vaguely: 'It's hard to know how these things happen. Quarrels begin, and neither person stops them, and they become silences, and nobody breaks them.'
  She thought calmly of the storm of emotions into which she had plunged, out of the untroubled quiet life of her girlhood in the valley. She had been sure that, whatever unhappiness came after, she would never regret the passion itself. Time had proved her doubly wrong; first in the contentment of her married life and her children, and later in the amazement that such contentment could have come out of what she saw, in retrospect, as squalid and ill-directed. She had not seen the squalidness of it then, but her father could hardly fail to be aware of it, and had not been able to conceal his awareness. That had been the key: his disgust and her resentment.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Pirrie completed his unravelling. From the middle of the blankets, he drew out his sporting rifle; the telescopic sight was still attached.
  Roger laughed, loudly and suddenly. 'Well, I'm damned! Things don't look quite so bad after all. Good old Pirrie.'
  Pirrie lifted out a small box in addition. 'Only a couple of dozen rounds, unfortunately,' he said, 'but it's better than nothing.'
  Only this morning, John thought, his reasons might have been based on scruples; and along with those scruples would have gone uncertainty and reluctance to impose his own decision on the others. Now he said sharply:
  John gazed at the weed-chequered ground on which they stood; it looked as though it might once have been pasture.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From the middle of the blankets, he drew out his sporting rifle; the telescopic sight was still attached.
  Roger laughed, loudly and suddenly. 'Well, I'm damned! Things don't look quite so bad after all. Good old Pirrie.'
  Pirrie lifted out a small box in addition. 'Only a couple of dozen rounds, unfortunately,' he said, 'but it's better than nothing.'
  Only this morning, John thought, his reasons might have been based on scruples; and along with those scruples would have gone uncertainty and reluctance to impose his own decision on the others. Now he said sharply:
  John gazed at the weed-chequered ground on which they stood; it looked as though it might once have been pasture.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And after that, he thought, the holidays with aunts, and his comradeship with David, all the deeper for their shared isolation. Had there been, beneath all that, a resentment of what his brother had – a hatred concealed even from himself ? He could not believe it, but the thought nagged him and would not be quieted.
  John spoke then. 'He'll do more than farm it, won't he? He will own it. It's a nice bit of land. Not as much as Cain left to Enoch, though.'
  He looked at her. 'Pirrie gave me his gun – he must have known, then, that he was finished. And when I saw that he had gone under, I thought of throwing it after him – that was the gun which brought us here to the valley, killing its way across England. I could have got to the shore more easily without it, and I was deadly tired. But I hung on to it.'
  He went to the bed, bent down, and kissed his brother's face. He had kissed another dead face only a few days before, but centuries lay between the two salutations. As he turned away towards the door, Ann asked: