Christmas 'Cast

The Coode Street podcast is putting up short interviews with authors for their Advent calendar, one every day in December until Christmas. Mine is posted here. A few of the books I read this year, including my personal favourite, Christmas ghost stories, and a few words about Loss Protocol.

Hampstead Heath, 08:10

 

 

(For several years now I've been walking about on Hampstead Heath as early as I can every Sunday morning, and posting on social media a photograph (taken with an iPhone) of something I liked. Thought I'd start putting the results up here, as well.)

North and South

 One thing’s certain about the near future: as in the unfolding present, everywhere on the planet will continue to be affected caused by global warming, from increases in the price of coffee and chocolate in your local supermarket to calamities and mass migrations caused by extreme weather and rapid and radical climate change. Yet the present uncertainty about whether there’s the political will to undertake mitigating actions and the multiplex effects of destabilisation of climate and the thinning of the biosphere mean that fictions which extrapolate from the ongoing can be so vastly varied that, like these two recent examples, they defy any attempt to corral them within formal taxonomic boundaries.

James Bradley’s Landfall is a thriller that mixes the conventional elements of a police procedural with a deep dive into social stresses and divides intensified by climate change. Detective Sadiya Azad’s search for a missing young girl in the Floodline, the damaged, half-drowned fringe of near-future Sydney, is complicated not only by the urgent need to close the case in the handful of days before a superstorm makes landfall (a clever and apt take on the classic ticking clock plot device), but also by the tensions between the authorities and the dispossessed inhabitants of the Floodline, and juggling the demands of the investigation with care of her father, Arman, who is suffering from advanced dementia. The narrative switches between the meticulous details of Sadiya’s investigation, Arman’s growing disorientation as memories of the catastrophe which drove him to leave Bangladesh jostle with the confusion of the present, and the plight of a homeless refugee, Tasim, who witnessed the kidnapping of the girl. Bradley’s evocation of the stifling heat and decay of the city’s edgelands, and rendering of the crises which devastated the lives of Tasim and Arman are vivid and potent, grounding Sadiya’s increasingly desperate determination to rescue the missing girl. A powerfully humane story of the lost and the saved in an increasingly precarious world.

In contrast to Bradley’s depiction of survival in an overheated, storm-ridden and sea-drowned future, E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again, is a more explicitly hopeful portrayal of communitarian efforts to make good the damage done to the biosphere by climate change and human activity. Its narrative, mostly set in the UK, alternates between the life stories of two women, framed by their meeting near the end of the third quarter of this century. Lucy’s story begins in the lockdowns of the first year of the Covid pandemic, and charts her development from youthful natural history enthusiast to a seasoned activist who plays a significant role in the rewilding movement; Hester’s follows her rising fame as a filmmaker as, accompanied by a dog she rescued from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, she documents the restoration of tracts of British wilderness.

As in her previous novel, The Coral Bones, Swift’s descriptions of the beautiful forms of the natural world are vivid and sympathetic. Instead of widescreen disasters or grimdark dystopian conflicts, there’s a scattering of melodramatic moments triggered by all-too-human foolishness and a steady sense of slippage and loss that’s countered by incremental changes won by hard work and self-sacrifice, culminating in an ending that feels deeply earned. And as in Landfall, the personal and political are inextricably intertwined, focusing on the granular details of the lives of the protagonists: the human stories in two distinctive versions of the Anthropocene.