On their own these events would be frightening, harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead. But in fact they are only one part of a much larger environmental crisis, embracing accelerating species loss, collapsing fish and bird populations and acidifying oceans. What’s worse, it’s a situation most of us feel powerless to affect.
In such a situation it’s probably not surprising that our literary culture has become suffused with narratives about the end of the world, or that so many of them have an environmental element. One only needs to look at the recent oeuvre of Margaret Atwood, whose Maddaddam trilogy took place against the backdrop of a world despoiled first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague, or American author Edan Lepucki’s debut, California, which depicts an America sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil and climactic instability, or her fellow American Nathaniel Rich’s surreal actuarial comedy, The Odds Against Tomorrow, the second half of which features a journey through a flooded Manhattan.
Some have argued this growing library of books exploring environmental themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as climate fiction or – to use the unlovely shorthand preferred by its proponents – cli-fi.
Speaking personally, I’m unconvinced of the term’s utility. After all, there’s nothing new about books about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as classic novels such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, John Christopher’s Grass, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or Australian author George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, which was recently republished as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, and takes place in a flooded Melbourne attest. Nor, given the fact many of these books are distinguished at least as much by their tendency to elide traditional genre categories as by their subject matter, does it seem useful to impose a rigid new category upon them.
But more deeply, the notion seems to ignore the fact that novels such as California and Maddaddam are really only a subset of a much larger phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease, like Emily St John Mandel’s luminous Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, but television shows such as The Walking Dead, in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion, in which the world’s most famous scientologist spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack. For while not all are about climate change in any narrow sense – in Station Eleven and The Dog Stars, for instance, civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic – they speak to the same fears, the same sense of vulnerability and loss, the same grief.
In one sense, of course, climate change is simply the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings. Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as The Road and Battlestar Galactica; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events like The Day After and books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day can be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.
Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion there is something different about climate change, and not just because of the scale of the challenges it presents. The scholar and critic Fredric Jameson once remarked that it’s easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism. And indeed it often seems we have lost our capacity to imagine the future, tending instead to imagine more of the same or total collapse.
As the writer Robert Macfarlane observed almost a decade ago, part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war; instead, it ‘occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatize aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.’
For writers of fiction this poses problems. Because it tends to focus upon character and psychology, fiction often struggles to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on timeframes that exceed the human. And so we tend to fall back on set pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is only one.
Looked at like this, our passion for narratives about our own extinction begins to look vaguely suspect, a symptom of a larger failure of imagination. For while they give shape to our sense of loss and vulnerability, there’s also something reassuring about imagining the end of the world, a sense in which it absolves us of the responsibility to imagine alternatives.
Imagining alternative futures has traditionally been the preserve of science fiction, so perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of science fiction’s luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology’s transformative power that underpinned science fiction’s Golden Age.
But it is also a reminder that genuine imaginative engagement with the meaning and effects of climate change demands writers do more than imagine devastated worlds and drowned cities. We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, find ways of expressing the way the changing climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations, find forms and modes capable of making sense of the enormity of what is happening around ourselves. Or, as the narrator of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 puts it as he looks out over Manhattan, ‘I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously … work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid’.
In many ways, that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender Floodline and Simon Ings’ bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain, Wolves, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are, as much if not more than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent novel, the deeply impressive Flight Behaviour, in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s rural Midwest, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray.
With its careful dissection of the contradictions of class and privilege (and and indeed its extraordinary final image’s reminder of the world’s capacity for sudden and transformative change), Flight Behaviour underlines the extent to which the challenges climate change presents are inextricably interwoven not just with a series of much older questions about wealth and power.
This awareness of the interconnectedness of these questions is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize–shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, The Girl in the Road, in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences, both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.
Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. And when it comes to climate change, that isn’t nothing: we need ways to articulate the despair so many of us feel about what is happening around us, abou
t the world we are bequeathing our children, about the species we are condemning to extinction.
But fiction can also help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that might mean big change: as Ursula Le Guin observed recently, ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.’ But if nothing else, it can help us grasp the enormity of what is happening in a way that allows us to comprehend it, and perhaps, just perhaps, begin to do something about it.
The Weekend Australian
Havoc: A Life in Accidents
Tim Winton
I
One summer night, after a few hours surfcasting for tailor, my father and I were driving home along a lonely road between the dunes and the bush. I felt snug and a little sleepy in the passenger’s seat, but it was my job to keep the gas lantern from tipping over, so I clamped it tight between my heels and resisted the urge to drift off. We’d gone down at sunset and caught a feed, but at the age of nine I could take or leave the fishing. The chief attraction of an outing like this was the chance to be alone with my father.
The evening had gotten cool and the windows were up. I remember the ordinary, reassuring smells inside the vehicle: the pilchards we used for bait, the burnt-toast whiff of the gas mantle, and the old man himself. In those days his personal scent was a cocktail of Dencorub and Quick-Eze. He hadn’t always smelt like that.
For a moment the inside of our car was bleached with light. I saw my own shadow creep across the dash. And then, with a yowl, a motorbike pulled out from behind and overtook us on the long straight towards town. There were no streetlights, no other cars. Either side of us there was just bush. The road had only recently been sealed. All my life it had been a limestone track. But now the city had reached the beach. Things were changing.
As the rider blew by, the old man gave a low whistle and I straightened a moment in my seat. Dad had complicated views about speed. He adored motorbikes; he’d ridden them all his life and he loved to ride fast. As a traffic cop he did it for a living. But then, half his job was to chase folks and pull them over for speeding. The rest of the time he picked up the pieces when things came unstuck. To me, speed was no thrill, and I was especially leery of motorbikes. My father’s medicinal smell was a constant reminder of both.
The lantern glass jinked and tinkled between my legs. Out ahead there was nothing to see but the black road and the single red eye of the rider’s tail-light. Then it was gone. The light didn’t shrink into the distance – suddenly it just wasn’t there.
Within half a second the night was jerked out of shape, and in the few minutes that followed, I felt that my life might warp and capsize along with it. I didn’t see the rider fall but I still think of him and his machine skittering on divergent trajectories across the rough-metalled bitumen. The old man pounded the brakes and we came to a howling halt. Dad got out and, with a startling new authority in his voice, told me to stay exactly where I was. Not that I needed telling.
I craned forward, stunned; my neck hurt from where the seat-belt had caught me. In the high beams I saw a motionless body on the limestone shoulder of the road. My father strode over and knelt beside the rider. His shadow was enormous; the headlights gave every movement and colour a nightmarish cast. The old man got up again. He dragged the motorbike off the road. When I wound down the window, I could smell petrol and all the salty, minty scents of the coastal scrub. A moment later the old man got back in. I was rattled by what I’d seen and disturbed by how businesslike Dad was. This drama did not seem to impress him. He sighed, buckled his seatbelt and started the car. He said we had to find a phone and call an ambulance. To my horror, we drove away and left the rider out there at the roadside. There was a bus terminal not far up the road, a lonely floodlit yard full of hulking green vehicles, and a sleepy security guard let Dad use the phone.
When we returned to the crash site, the injured rider began to stir. I didn’t know it then but he was convulsing. It was as if he was being shot through with electricity. As Dad climbed out of the car, he said he had an important job for me. I was to stamp on the brake pedal over and over again without stopping, so the ambulance crew could see our red lights in the distance. The idea made practical sense, but I’m sure it was mostly a means of keeping me occupied and out of harm’s way. Many years later, by another roadside, I employed a similar tactic to keep my own kids from seeing something worse. As a kid it was good to be commissioned, to feel useful for a short while, and as I clung to the steering wheel and jabbed at the brake pedal, which I could barely reach, my father crouched out there in the lights, talking to the fallen rider, who kept fluttering in and out of consciousness, trying to get up on his shuddering legs. Every time the man turned his head I saw that his face was raw meat. Some of it hung off in strips, like paperbark. It was red, white and yellow. His leather jacket was glossy with blood. He tried to haul himself up on his elbows. Then he was screaming.
After a long time there was a siren in the distance, the distinctive two-note sound of an ambulance, and the noise seemed to inflame the fallen rider, whose yelling and swearing and struggling grew more violent. He needed to go, he kept bawling. Where was his bike? When Dad suggested he stay put for his own benefit, the bloke wanted to fight. Dad held him down by the arms.
I thought everything would be fine once the ambulance arrived, but when it finally pulled up the whole scene intensified, as though some fresh madness had arrived with the help. There were suddenly more bodies, more voices, more flashing lights and lurid shadows. And at some point a different man – an even louder bloke – appeared, announcing himself as the rider’s father. I don’t know how he got there or how he’d been informed but I could see he was staggering drunk, and I felt myself come to a new level of alertness. There was something vicious and unpredictable about him. His eyes were wild. He had the look of a mistreated dog. As he stumbled towards his son, who’d already been lifted onto a gurney, he was weeping and blubbering. Then he went crazy. It looked as though he was trying to throttle his son. When my father and the ambos hauled him off, he wheeled on them, snarling, and began to swing at them.
I didn’t stop pumping the brakes; I’d been drafted and I took it seriously. It was as if I’d woken in a cinema during the final reel of a horror movie. Everything was way over my head. And it wouldn’t stop. I’d never witnessed anything like this before – all the blood, the flashing teeth and fists, the screamed obscenities. This was mayhem. As a kid I’d been shielded from drunks. I had no experience of violence, domestic or otherwise. I’d certainly never seen a grown man act like this before. I couldn’t believe he could hurt his injured son like that. And I was deeply disturbed by the prospect of him hurting my father. I was outraged and terrified, and so paralysed it felt like I’d been booted with an electric charge myself. A wild man was attacking my dad. He was lurching and lunging at the ambos, too, but they were uniformed strangers, and to me they were just shadows dancing, I barely took them in; I only had eyes for the old man. And it didn’t matter that he was fending off every blow with an ease bordering on contempt. What I saw was my father under siege, in danger. And I couldn’t help him. I stayed where I was, lashed to the wheel, in a state I had no language for.
Eventually the police came. The scene quickly resolved itself. Dad dusted himself off and came clopping back to the car in his thongs, chuckling at something the coppers had said. We were late for tea now, and he was eager to be on his way. I could hardly speak. At home, Dad did what he could to minimise this lurid little interlude. His account of it to Mum was cursory. But the experience stayed with me. There was something dangerous and outsized about the emotions it had stirred up, and the sensation was like being caught in a rip: no purchase, no control.
That scene has puzzled me all my life, haunted me in a way. I was a middle-aged man before I under
stood why I’d been so afraid. Of course it’s distressing for any child to see a parent under threat, but what was happening for me that night was a little more complicated. I was cast back into an old fear and a much earlier accident.
By the time I was nine there were things about the old man I’d gotten used to. The scar on his neck was silvery by then, and when he came out of the shower the divots in his hip weren’t so livid any more. The ever-present tubes of Dencorub were just part of him now, as was the roll of Quick-Eze forever sliding across the dashboard. I was so accustomed to all this I’d forgotten what the heat rub was for. He’d been dealing with chronic pain for years. Dencorub was the only relief he had once the quack had taken him off the anti-inflammatory drugs, and those wretched pills had left him with stomach ulcers, which was why he chewed antacids as if they were lollies. He’d been taken away from me before. I’d seen him all but destroyed. And it had been only three or four years since his prang. Now I went fishing every chance I could. To be close to him, as if unconsciously I feared he’d be taken away again. Clinging to the wheel of his car that night, half out of my mind, it was as if someone had kicked the chocks out from under me. The sight of my father under threat again was almost too much to bear. We’d been delivered, Mum and my siblings and me, and for a long time I’d felt safe again, and now, quite suddenly, I wasn’t safe at all.
*
In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these. The abrupt and headlong are old familiars. For all the comforts and privileges that have come my way over the years, my life feels like a topography of accidents. Sometimes, for better or worse, they are the landmarks by which I take my bearings. I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education. They’re havoc’s vanguard. They fascinate me. I respect them. But I dread them too.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 8
