by John Atcheson
Cross-posted from Climate Progress.
Sometimes, fiction is the best way to win friends and
influence people – H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and
George Orwell’s classic 1984 come to
mind. Each provoked a visceral reaction
that galvanized the culture around it, changing forever the way issues such as
class and totalitarianism were perceived. Neville Shute’s On the Beach made the
consequences of nuclear war real, and, therefore, unthinkable.
In a scientifically illiterate culture such as ours, these
kinds of myth-based meta-narratives may be the best way to communicate complex
scientific issues like climate change. Myths, as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell revealed, are not necessarily
false, nor are they automatically at odds with science. At their best, they provide another way of
viscerally experiencing a truth.
A spate of novels and movies that feature climate change as
either an overt part of the story line or an implicit backdrop against which
mythical heroes strive may be creating the critical mass for a cultural
awakening that allows climate change to be perceived at that pre-rational level—the kind of limbic awareness that motivates change. Or so we can hope.
Full disclosure: I am
at work on a trilogy that tells the story of one man’s struggle to prevent
climate change, and to survive it and preserve some small part of nature when
he fails.
Climate Progress is getting sent a steady stream of books—fiction and non-fiction—centered on global warming. I’ll be reviewing the best of these from time
to time, beginning today with Far North by Marcel
Theroux (yes, he is related to writer Paul Theroux—he is his oldest son) and
Primitive by Mark Nykanen. These novels are worlds apart in conceit,
yet each is thoroughly enjoyable.
Far North takes place in
Siberia in the not too distant future in a world transformed by climate
change. The central character,
Makepeace, is among the last surviving members of a Quaker settlement that
retreated to Siberia from America to avoid the excesses of a materialistic society
and a changing climate.
By the time Theroux’s story begins, civilization has
collapsed, bands of the lawless and dispossessed roam the land, and Makepeace
lives a solitary life with her books and her garden, protecting the remnants of
a ghost town against the occasional hoards of criminals that pass by.
Climate change is a backdrop—the setting on the stage in
which the story takes place. It is
rarely mentioned, but integral to Makepeace’s existence—an understated
leitmotif that runs throughout the novel, but doesn’t dominate it. Theroux gets the science right. Winters still snow; Siberia is still cold,
though not as cold; and precisely because of that, it has attracted climate
refugees. It is the Wild West set in the
East.
Against this backdrop, and beset by grief over the death of
Ping, a pregnant wanderer Makepeace has adopted, Makepeace sets off on a
journey that will be familiar to readers and moviegoers. Like the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Denzel Washington in The
Book of Eli, Theroux’s protagonist wanders through a post-apocalyptic
Hobbesian world where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short-a world
in which the apex predator is man.
The resemblance to The
Road goes beyond plot. With Far North,
Theroux has accomplished what McCarthy has consistently done—written a
literary novel that has clear commercial potential. The characters are well wrought, metaphor is
wound inextricably into character and plot, and it’s clear that Theroux has
bigger metaphysical fish to fry than a simple thriller typically offers.
For all that, it has plenty of thrills and surprises. Three chapters into the novel, for example,
Theroux literally pulls the rug out from under the reader, creating a forehead
slapping moment akin to that in The Sixth
Sense. Yet once he’s done
with it, the novel moves forward relatively seamlessly, with the reader alert
to the possibility of more twists and turns.
In the end, it’s the novel’s story and plot that
delight. If there is a flaw, it is that
coincidence and serendipity have been invoked too often and too obviously to
serve Theroux’s literary ambitions. Yet
it remains a good read that renders climate change as a reality and a palpable
force to be reckoned with and avoided.
Mark Nykanen’s Primitive makes no literary pretensions. It is a
thriller pure and simple—the reader hops into a rocket sled and holds on for
dear life, in a nail-chewing ride full of action, gut-wrenching fear, and
genuine terror. There’s no getting off once you’ve boarded. So leave yourself some time.
Nykanen, who was an investigative reporter for NBC news
before becoming a novelist, is adept at weaving plausible conspiracies, and his
experience as a counterculture reporter in his early career is put to good use
in Primitive.
The story opens when middle-aged model Sonya Adams lands a
job for a fashion shoot in Montana. But
almost immediately, she is kidnapped and used as a pawn by eco-terrorists.
Sonya—a good-hearted but politically clueless protagonist—is thrust into
an epic struggle between the government, corporations, and the primitive cult
that has kidnapped her and taken her to their secret compound Terra Firma.
Nykanen also gets the science right for the most part. The eco-cult
is using Sonya’s abduction to orchestrate media attention in a carefully staged
campaign to draw attention to a top secret CIA report they’ve obtained. It details an imminent threat of extreme
climate disruption caused by methane releases from the Arctic tundra and
near-shore clathrates. The Primitives skillfully issue a series of podcasts
featuring Sonya, counting on the presence of a “white woman in distress” to
spin up media interest, and soon it does, complete with nonstop coverage of
“The Terror at Terra Firma.”
Sonya’s disaffected daughter sets off to find her, followed
by the FBI, a truly sinister “contractor,” and an anti-terrorist task force.
The novel’s ending, in true thriller fashion, brings all
these ingredients together in a harrowing face-off.
One of Nykanen’s best achievements is to allow the reader to
experience the way the eco-cult is transformed in Sonya’s eyes. As she learns what it is they are trying to
accomplish and what is at stake, they grow to seem more sane than the society
she’s been abducted from. Nykanen also
manages to skewer the media, the government, and big bad oil, without too heavy
a hand.
While the pace is quick, Primitive does wander into the land of the didactic, and the science, although plausible,
drifts into the pedantic on occasion. But there are enough thrills to
compensate for that.
Purists and literalists may quibble with some of Nykanen’s
portrayal of sudden climate change, but as I was about to accuse him of
hyperbole, I was reminded of the last line from Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe:
It may seem impossible to imagine
that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy
itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
Given the stakes, one can forgive Nykanen a little hyperbole
… if hyperbole it be.
Related Links:
Jeff Biggers talks about his new book on coal
I paid $50 for this book and all I got was this lousy feeling of hope and goodwill
