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

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.

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, 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.

Mr McCarthy wrote “The Road” after becoming a father in his 50s. Gazing over a Texan landscape with his son, he imagined the hills scorched black, depredations the boy would see but he would not. The story can be interpreted as a message from Mr 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.

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.

A profound futurist book that helped galvanise my thoughts on the importance of future thinking on climate change

I cannot remember a book and a movie that made a greater impression on me - simply because it made sense as a logical consequence of what humanity is doing and how we are thinking. I will say this - if we don't change direction (I doubt we will), we'll end up where we are going.

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