J.R. Burgmann

In his monograph The Great Derangement (2016), Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pointedly asks why society, and more specifically literature, has almost entirely ignored climate change: ‘ours was a time when most forms of … literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. This was, Ghosh concludes, because ‘serious prose fiction’ had become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that rely on notions of quotidian probability. The irony of the realist novel, then, is that ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real’.

Setting aside Ghosh’s claim that there is a shortage of ‘serious’ (as opposed to ‘genre’) climate fiction – which James Bradley finds ‘incoherent … once you start looking, anxiety about climate change … is everywhere’ – the main conclusion stands. If the narrative arts are indeed crucial mechanisms by which human societies come to understand themselves, ours have generally failed to comprehend the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, thereby committing an erasure or concealment of the prevailing crisis of our time. The significant exceptions to this observation have mostly lain in so-called genre fiction, or, as Ghosh would have it, ‘generic outhouses’. Enter Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander, a novel that brings into stark relief the formal complexities of representing climate change in fiction.

Set in the near future, in a world that ‘seemed to be dying in flame and famine and flooding and disease’, VanderMeer’s latest novel is a thriller overlain with eco-philosophical and Anthropocene anxieties: thus an eco-thriller. When a nameless barista delivers a message to cybersecurity expert ‘Jane Smith’ – the veracity of her actual name is, like much of the novel, shrouded in mystery – her suburban family life in the Pacific north-west of the United States is set irreversibly on a tumultuous and tragic path. Initially, the message leads to a box containing the taxidermied remains of an extinct hummingbird alongside a cryptic note from someone called Silvina, whom Jane quickly discovers to be Silvina Vilcapampa, a corporate heiress turned eco-terrorist of cultish renown, now believed to be deceased. Following the clues set off in Silvina’s wake, Jane descends into a world of espionage and conspiracy that puts her husband and daughter in great danger. As Jane goes on the run, the narrative becomes increasingly complex, connecting her traumatic past with the present planetary exploits of the Vilcapampa corporation and Silvina’s feverish, prophetic writings on our planetary future:

‘So many toxic constructs’

Jeff VanderMeer’s eco-thriller

J.R. Burgmann

Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

4th Estate $29.99 pb, 400 pp If we could … really see the world, how radically we would change it. How different we would become … The -ism that will fix this has not [yet] been written down ... So we are left with flawed ways of thinking … so many toxic constructs … But still we must try.

The interplay of narrative elements is cogent, but as an experiment in hybridity between thriller and climate fiction, Hummingbird Salamander yields mixed results. The most considerable of these is that, while the novel is intricate and surprising, the passing references to the state of the planet often read as bullet-point breakdown rather than planetary breakdown, an eschatological litany extrapolated from the present: ‘Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine’. All this is merely mise en scène, as are the oblique allusions to pandemic that punctuate the text. But these overarching threats often lack definition and have hardly any discernible effect on narrative proceedings, with the stakes of the planet playing out, as VanderMeer teases, ‘always somewhere else’. And while the commentary is clear – that the innumerable effects of climate change or societal collapse remain psychologically distant until disaster strikes, until the planetary becomes personal – the lack of political articulation results in a certain obscurity: ‘birds still migrated north, and south, despite the changes to climate’ amid the unspecified ‘disintegrating political situation. Uncertain, dangerous times.’ The violent pilgrimage Jane undertakes in search of Silvina and what might remain of her utopian project is thus difficult to comprehend, particularly for a woman of self-proclaimedly centrist politics.

Inevitably, novelists are turning to climate change, if not always for their principal subject matter, then as a contextualising backdrop, as in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13). What is curious about Hummingbird Salamander is that, in spite of its imprecise contexts, it remains, contrary to Ghosh’s line of thinking, both genre and ‘serious climate fiction’. VanderMeer achieves this effect through characteristic philosophical dexterity. Though less cerebral than his Southern Reachtrilogy (2014) – the first book of which, Annihilation, was adapted into the 2018 Alex Garland film of the same name – Hummingbird Salamander bears the same ecocritical inclinations, paired now with a more explicit consideration of not only climate but also the unspeakable loss in our Anthropocene moment, a period in which ‘the things meant to help us were hurting us and the things meant to hurt us continued to get better at it’. VanderMeer’s philosophical register, articulated through Silvina’s recovered writings and focalised through Jane’s unreliable narration, lends the text a dimension of elegy:

Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were … shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I learned to care less. Silvina called it ‘the fatal adaptation’.

Given the heartfelt environmentalism manifest in Jeff Vander Meer’s oeuvre, this welcome experimentation with fiction that explicitly engages with anthropogenic climate change seems likely to continue. g

J.R. Burgmann is a PhD candidate of Monash University.