Shelly Dennison rounds up four more climate fiction reads:
As regular readers will know, this year I’ve been exploring the Climate Fiction Prize Longlist which has been introducing me to new authors and expanding my fiction reading horizons. I’ve been thinking about the books in relation to the questions posed by the Climate Fiction Prize website – how is the major challenge of our times being reflected in fiction? How does fiction allow us to explore our individual and collective response to climate change? What impact can climate fiction have?
This book review post brings together four titles I’ve read recently in an overview of some of the trends in climate fiction.
Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood isn’t actually on the longlist as it predates the prize. It was published in 2023 and is set in New Zealand. Catton was born in Canada but moved to New Zealand as a child, winning the Booker Prize in 2013 for her novel ‘The Luminaries’. The story follows a guerilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood who begin a new project on a farm that appears to have been abandoned. The backdrop to the book includes a tech billionaire and illegal mining for rare minerals in the National Park. I enjoyed the set up and the character development more than the denouement, but it’s neatly done and explores climate change, mineral extraction, conservation and activism in a way I haven’t seen in other climate fiction titles. One for readers who enjoy contemporary political thrillers.
Birnam Wood’s storytelling is straightforward and accessible, by contrast, Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright requires concentration. It is set in contemporary Australia and the author is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria on the northern coast of Australia. It tells the story of Praiseworthy, a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which is a symbol of both the climate crisis and the ancestors of the people of the town. I found it a difficult read on two levels. Firstly the prose style is quite impressionistic, each section is told by an oracle and the stories overlap rather than running in a linear fashion. It became clear quite quickly that the best thing to do was just to let the torrent of words wash over me and hope that the essentials stuck. It’s also challenging in terms of subject matter and readers might want to search out the content warnings before tackling the book which, at over 700 pages, isn’t for the faint hearted. I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed it but it did feel like an important book to have read and, perhaps most importantly, encouraged me to find out more about some of the Australian politics and climate change impacts explored in the story. One for readers who enjoy a challenge or want to read climate fiction from indigenous writers.
I loved the premise of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley which was a shortlisted title for the Climate Fiction Prize. It’s set in England in the near future where a mysterious government ministry project is testing whether time travel is feasible using a handful of ‘expats’ who have been gathered from different periods. The unnamed narrator of the book is assigned expat 1847, a former Victorian polar explorer, for whom she acts as a ‘bridge’, explaining modern life. The first section of the book is often very funny as the historical characters settle in, with varying degrees of success. The story initially appears to be a romantic comedy but becomes darker in the second half of the book as the nature of project comes into focus. Ultimately the book asks us to imagine what strategies a future world might feel compelled to try in order to avert a complete climate collapse, but also makes it clear that the future isn’t decided and in that sense it is a hopeful story. I would happily have spent more time with these characters and Bradley’s very readable prose. One for readers who enjoy romance with a twist.
Finally, And So I Roar by Abi Daré was this year’s Climate Fiction Prize winner. It’s a gripping story of resilience and hope that explores the experiences of women and girls in Nigeria. The book is full of vividly drawn characters and locations which means that the weighty themes of climate change, access to education, violence and oppression are rooted in the storytelling rather than being grafted on top. I found it the most compelling of all the books I’ve read so far and struggled to put it down. The book is a sequel to ‘The Girl with the Louding Voice’ which I haven’t read (yet!) but is satisfying in its own right. One for anyone who enjoys stories of family and friendship that tackle big issues.
Having now read six recent climate fiction titles (the four here plus Orbital and The Mars House reviewed earlier in the year) it’s becoming clear that one of the defining features of it as a subsection of fiction is its sheer variety. The books come from a range of genres and explore different aspects of the climate crisis. For me they are at their most successful when the characters feel well rounded and we care about what happens to them, where the themes don’t override the story. Climate fiction can take readers beyond facts and figures through telling stories that encourage us to ask ‘what if?’, engaging the imagination and the heart as well as the head.
Shelly Dennison is a director of JRI, Website Content Creator at CPRE Bedfordshire, the countryside charity, and a freelance writer.