While the world burns, we languish in our existential dissonance. How do we see what we can’t imagine? How do we come to terms with such immense change?
This myopic view is well suited to exploring climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, as it mirrors our own chronic short-sightedness and self-interest when it comes to imagining the planet’s ecological future. In the world around us right now, cities like Cape Town are running out of drinking water, the Larsen C ice shelf is collapsing in Antarctica and the biomass of the world’s bugs are disappearing at a catastrophic rate. While the world burns, we languish in our existential dissonance. When the sea disappears from Clapstone, the townsfolk struggle to comprehend it: ‘How do we see what we can’t imagine?’ they ask. How do we come to terms with such immense change?
Indian novelist, Amitav Ghosh calls this ‘the great derangement’: our willful ignorance and inability to grasp the future. What little public policy conversation we have about climate change continues to be partisan. Mills and other Australian writers such as James Bradley, Jane Rawson, Sally Abbott and Mireille Juchau are nudging climate change out of the realms of science fiction and into the literary mainstream.
In his Sydney Review of Books essay Writing on the Precipice, James Bradley explains the difficulty of squeezing climate change into the container of a novel. Climate change has a global economic and historical context, while novels tend to be articulated through an experience ‘for individuals and individual landscapes.’ This tension is exacerbated because narrative drive in a novel works most effectively through catastrophic events, while much of climate change is incremental. As the residents of Clapstone reflect: ‘It’s surprising how fast you get used to things’.
Mills is a conjurer of evocative language and fantastic imagery…some sections of the novel looping time scales to create surreal dreamscapes.
Mills is a conjurer of evocative language and fantastic imagery with a unique and poetic writing style, some sections of the novel looping time scales to create surreal dreamscapes. The novel’s cover features a cuttlefish and the book is laden, perhaps a little too liberally, with marine metaphors and imagery (continuing what seems to be a fascination among Australian women speculative fiction writers for marine invertebrates – see Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace and Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck). This floating other-worldliness is juxtaposed with sections of realism and a drift into satire in the novel’s second half, when Clapstone’s residents are subject to a commercial relationship with a mysterious corporation. There is a jarring stylistic gear shift that is dislocating, a temporal slipperiness that mimics Sam’s dyschronia, disorienting the reader. A lighter touch here would have made this more effective and less confusing to follow.
The perspective in Mills’ novel shifts between Sam’s third person point of view and the first person plural ‘we’ of the town’s residents. This gives the novel an, at times, disjointed experience akin to watching a super-8 film flicker in and out of focus, skipping through grainy frames, and setting up an emotional distance from the reader that undermines an otherwise inventive narrative trajectory.
While Mills’ novel is a little shaky on execution, is it ambitious and deserving of a wide audience. Perhaps her biggest achievement is to focus the lens on Clapstone to highlight the myopic way we view climate change. Clapstone is not futuristic; it is strangely familiar, eerily like any small Australian country town. We recognise ourselves in its residents. Perhaps as Sam is an oracle for Clapstone’s future, writers like Mills and her contemporaries are our soothsayers, painting a bleak picture of an ecological, social and economic future that we are blind to, while it unfolds right before our eyes.
