The violence of glamour

Coming to terms with teetering

Signs and Wonders

by Delia Falconer

Review by Jenny Bird

Every summer our frangipani tree becomes a generous green umbrella that shades the front deck. This year it started to lose its leaves early. I wonder if it has developed unhappy wet feet from La Nina. Is this early shedding an aberration that will correct itself next summer? Or is it a more portentous sign of climate change? In her latest book Signs and Wonders Australian writer Delia Falconer argues that we are all at the beginning of a process of emotional and cognitive ‘rearrangement’, the breadth and depth of which is not clear to us yet. She describes a world that is full of ‘the weight of apprehension’, systems that ‘pitch and wobble’, the ‘vertigo’ we feel as we ‘teeter on the edge of ordinariness that threatens to drop away into the unimaginable’. She asks: ‘Do we have the emotional [and mental] repertoire to take in such enormity?’ Signs and Wonders is a collection of essays which loosely fits in the non-fiction section of ‘climate change literature’. On the shelves beside it sit books by Australian writers such as Sophie Cunningham, James Bradley and Jonica Newby who use memoir, essay and hybrid forms of literary non-fiction to articulate the unease, anxiety and uncertainty that is defining this century. But pigeon-holing the book as ‘climate change literature’ does not do full justice to the wide net that Falconer casts both within and across the thirteen pieces in the collection. The book does, as one would expect, chronicle signs of climate change in the natural world – sea creatures, birds, animals, forests, coral, trees, glaciers and icecaps. And amidst the stories of extinction and loss are the wonders to which the title alludes. Here we find Falconer trawling the feeds of quirky Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sites that report on appearances of ‘beautiful and uncanny marvels’. The thawing permafrost in the Arctic, for example, has exposed extinct animals such as the prehistoric wolf cub, and the perfectly preserved 42,000-year old Lena foal. Whilst these phenomena may be wondrous and amusing, she worries that we are turning our ‘dying world into a modern cabinet of curiosities’. She asks: is the earth calling out to us? But Falconer has intellectual ambitions that reach far beyond the science of climate change. She probes its impacts on culture – popular culture, photography, film and television, contemporary literature, COVID, consumerism, 9/11 and, among other things, the changing shape of paragraphs. The reach and rigour of the research that underpins the collection is breathtaking – science, literature, popular culture, history and philosophy. Yet at the same time the writing is accessible and personal. Many of the essays use a small local event or a personal experience as launching pads for wider, deeper, more scholarly interrogation. One essay diarises the experiences of Falconer, her family, friends and neighbours through the fires of 2019-2020. She marks that summer as the no-goingback point of realisation that climate change has tipped forever out of control. For her, a Sydneysider, it was the smoke that settled over the city in November 2019. For me, it was September of that year, when fires tore through Lamington National Park and destroyed Binna Burra Lodge. Rainforest is not supposed to burn like that.

In ‘Coal: An Unnatural History’ she takes her twin children to Parliament House in Canberra where she discovers that the children’s brochure uses a fossil named ‘Shaun the Prawn’ as a fun device that is actually celebrating the Age of Coal. Then in ‘Good Neighbours’ a fur seal hauls up on a footpath in her harbourside suburb. From ‘Sealvester’s’ problematic presence Falconer riffs on the wild history of Sydney Harbour, zoos, wild animals in general, debates on the

neighbourhood Facebook page about how best the situation should be handled, and more. Other essays are works of literary criticism that survey trends in writing and publishing that connect to the pitching times in which we live. Nobel Prize-winning author J.M Coetzee describes one of these essays as an ‘illuminating exploration of the subterranean forces at work in the English-language fiction of our new century.’ In the award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’ she explores recent writings that are trying ‘to grapple with how to tell the story of this great, ongoing loss’. In another essay she turns her attention to the rise in popularity of ‘thing books’ – books that fetishise things like perfume, snow, cod or salt. And then to their decline as internet ‘stuff’ overwhelmed us, and things lost their magic. Then there is ‘The Disappearing Paragraph’ (my favourite). Here Falconer laments the decline of the indented paragraph and the rise of double spacing between them. She asks, ‘what does it mean when novelists choose to give their paragraphs free range on the page?’ She wonders how paragraphs floating isolated from each other might change the way we read and think. Are they symptoms of (or monuments to?) a loss of the connective tissue that binds our thoughts and feelings into a sustained and cohesive narrative? The last essay ‘Everything is Illuminated’ is audacious in its reach, carefully stitched together with a luminous filament. It stretches out across a detailed analysis of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, glow worms, neon, glamour, enlightenment, the nature of truth, and, inevitably, climate change. In it she writes breathtaking sentences: ‘Glamour is a kind of violence that beautifies the deathly comet tail of endless consumption it trails behind it.’ Delia Falconer is one of Australia’s finest writers. Signs and Wonders is her fourth book since her sensational first novel The Service of Clouds was published in 1998. Following came The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers in 2005 and then Sydney in 2010, a non-fiction personal history of the city in which she lives. Collectively her first three books were shortlisted for seventeen national awards across categories of fiction, non-fiction, innovation, history and biography. She also writes short stories, essays, articles and critical reviews. James Bradley describes the essays in Signs and Wonders as brave, beautiful, breathtaking, elegant and intelligent. Every morning I sweep the brown frangipani leaves off the path and the deck. I don’t know how to read the early shedding. But I’m reassured that I’m not alone in my fretful search for signs. And that we are all engaged in this project of rearranging ourselves in the face of uncertainty. And that the project is as much cultural as it is scientific. And that good writing

Simon & Schuster / 288pp / RRP $32.99