THE ECONOMIST magazine in the UK goes cli-fi with this article April 4, 2019

THE TALLEST STORY

 

Can the novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change?

Writers are coming to appreciate the theme’s urgency—and its narrative possibilities

 

THE ECONOMIST magazine in the UK

goes cli-fi with this [UNSIGNED] article [NO BYLINE]

April 4, 2019

 

The literary novel has a problem with scale. For centuries it has principally focused on the stuff of everyday life. It doesn’t generally concern itself with the cataclysmic or tectonic. Compare Homer’s “Odyssey” with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: whereas the epic incorporates gods, slaughters and the fate of nations, the novel celebrates the intimate and quotidian.

The literary novel has a problem with time. Novels are one of the ways in which a culture thinks about the challenges it faces, but frequently the form looks to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into the future. The Victorian novel pondered the rapidly industrialising economy and shifting class structures of the age. Yet many of the great books of the period, from “Middlemarch” to “A Tale of Two Cities”, employed historical settings. Today’s novelists often turn to the two world wars, or even more remote eras, for their subjects.

These tendencies are a handicap in the age of climate change, a crisis which is both current and to come. The Brooklyn novelist Amitav Ghosh recognized this drawback in “The Great Derangement”, a collection of essays published in 2016. In a piece ostensibly about environmental catastrophe, Ghosh pondered the cultural role of the novel. Climate change, he argued, seems just too capacious, uncertain and abstract a subject to be addressed by a form with an innate fear of the unknowable and provisional—ie, of the future. And if the novel cannot confront the biggest danger to humanity, can it retain its relevance?

Time is a factor in more ways than one. Particularly since Modernism, which saw Joyce and Virginia Woolf anatomise the minutiae of life, literary time has been circumscribed. Whether it is Mrs Dalloway’s day or the longer arc of the Bildungsroman, there is generally an inherent limit on the temporal horizons of serious novels: the length of a character’s life. Novelistic time is tightly bounded, as well as being sequestered in the past. The leap forward needed to envisage the climate’s trajectory requires more elastic parameters.

Not all fiction is hobbled in this way. What Ghosh snobbishly calls the “generic outhouses”—speculative and science fiction—have tried to tackle climate change head-on. These genre boundaries are blurry and contested: J.G. Ballard’s “The Drowned World” (1962), a sci-fi novel that was among the first to deal with climate-related fears, has been reassessed and reclassified as the author’s reputation evolved. But the literary novel has long defined itself in opposition to other genres, and the future and its risks have been tainted by association. At least, they were until recently.

Not waving but drowning

 

As the divide between literary and other types of fiction has become increasingly porous, so the literary establishment has begun to recognise the imaginative possibilities of climate change. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” (2006), in which a father and son traverse an ashen landscape after an unnamed apocalypse, was an early turning point. The book served as a bridge between the fears of one generation, which involved mushroom clouds and mutually assured destruction, and those of the next, which are of melting ice caps and wildfires.

McCarthy wrote “The Road” based on a dream he had about a major comet strike on Earth after becoming a father in his 50s. Gazing over a Texan landscape with his son, he imagined the hills scorched black by a comet strike, depredations the boy would see but he would not. The story can be interpreted as a message from McCarthy to his child, as a metaphor for a universal anxiety about leaving offspring to fend for themselves, and as a dramatisation of a horror that humans have despoiled the Earth. The book draws attention to the fact that novels are in a sense always about the future, because that is when they will be read. It was a breakthrough for writers keen to engage with the climate. Novelists including Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood have done so.

Now the genre that McCarthy helped galvanise, sometimes known as “cli-fi”and dubbed thus by literary blogger Dan Bloom in 2011, is gathering pace. His impulse to tell stories for future generations animates two recent examples. In “The End We Start From”, Megan Hunter evokes “An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children.” The anonymous narrator shepherds her baby son, Z, through this flooded Britain in search of safety and the boy’s father. The narrative is interlaced with passages from mythological sources, closing the circle between the destructive floods of the cli-fi future and the watery origin stories of many religions.

Similarly, Louise Erdrich’s “Future Home of the Living God” purports to be written by a woman to her unborn child, preparing it for the world it will inhabit. A thermometer ticks upwards like a primed bomb; the novel ends with a lyrical passage in which the narrator recalls the snows of her youth. “Next winter it rained. The cold was mild and refreshing. But only rain. That was the year we lost winter.”

Some dystopias combine the spectre of climate carnage with other fears. John Lanchester’s “The Wall” imagines a future in which Britain’s coastlines have been replaced by the titular wall, built to hold back both the rising tides and the “Others”—boat-borne hordes seeking refuge. The migrant crisis and Brexit contribute to a bleak vision of paranoid insularity. In Omar El Akkad’s “American War”, meanwhile, swathes of late-21st-century America are under water. Florida has vanished; a second civil war erupts over fossil-fuel usage.

Literary novelists have begun to appreciate that climate change is not just an urgent subject but a font of drama and plots. All too soon the theme may revert from the territory of science fiction to the realm of old-fashioned realism.

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The tallest story."