Books
THE SKINNY
Apocalypse in 2021 As we come to the end of another year that truly feels like the end of times are nigh, Katie Goh – author of The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters – looks back on 2021 through a literary apocalyptic lens Illustration: Kasia Kozakiewicz
December 2021 — Feature
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hat do we do with the warnings we receive? Do we take action, suddenly spurred into motion by alarm? Or do we, as Jessie Greengrass writes in her novel The High House, “[tune] it out like static”? Or, as per Jenny Offill in her Orwell Prize-longlisted novel, Weather, continue to sit in a “twilight knowing”, a refusal to engage with what we know, but prefer to ignore? These questions are becoming less rhetorical as the end times roll on. Post-COP26 – the UN climate conference that was called the “best last hope” for our world and, soon after it finished, declared a failure – it feels like we are on a one-way road to the apocalypse. We’ve been walking this road for a while now. Crisis after crisis has thrown us into a state of normalised turmoil: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the 2008 economic crash, devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, political upheaval, the arrival of data-driven surveillance capitalism, the COVID-19 virus and an environmental catastrophe that is bringing about the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. These are just recent global upheavals contributing to a collective feeling of relentless, accelerating doom. As we sit, stupefied like frogs in slowly boiling water, how can we comprehend our own demise? When the rent is due next week and the shops are out of avocados and we’re all just trying to carve out some sort of normality after nearly two years of a pandemic, how can we even begin to process all of this disaster? Writers have always responded to the world around them and now is no different. 2021 has seen an abundance of novelists tackle environmental, political and technological disasters through fiction. As we come to the end of another year that has highlighted just how apocalyptic life on Earth has become, we look back at some of this year’s novels that grapple with our collective “twilight knowing” and the futures that could be ahead. Beginning as the world ends – “crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability,” narrates the teenager, Caro – Greengrass’s novel The High House is set in rural Suffolk. While the world ignored imminent environmental catastrophe until it was too late, Caro’s stepmother, a prominent scientist, prepared a house for the family to move into with the meticulous planning of a doomsday prepper. Removed from floods and mudslides, Caro and her family’s situation parallels that of the wealthy in the Global North right now. “We are all at the mercy of the weather, but not all to the same extent,” thinks Caro early in the novel. Geography and wealth will be what
saves – or kills – most of us as the climate crisis continues to rage on. Evoking Noah’s Ark, the book explores parental responsibility during environmental catastrophe, asking the queasy question: what are the ethics of bringing children into a world on fire? It’s a theme that is also tackled by the Danish writer Ursula Scavenius in her collection of short stories, The Dolls (translated into English by Jennifer Russell and published by Lolli). Opening with the sound of violins and the fall of ash, the collection's titular story is set in a world that could be either 20th-century or 22nd-century Europe. “The violin bows gnaw at the strings the same way we gnaw at chicken bones,” narrates the young protagonist, as the music relentlessly plays. The narrator, a young girl in a wheelchair, feeds her sister through a cellar grille, as they play with dolls with glued-on hair. Scavenius’ writing is stark and cold, and The Dolls is a story drenched with post-apocalyptic dread. A monstrosity called ‘the Machine,’ where the girls’ parents work in the hope that they’ll be left alone, continues to roll closer to the family’s home. Every time the narrator looks away and back at the Machine, it’s inched closer, until it’s almost on top of them. Like the climate crisis in The High House, Scavenius’ story is about the normalisation of looming, terrible disaster. Rather than flee, The Dolls’ family accepts the rolling regime, acclimatising to its terror until it’s too late. The Dolls captures the sense of fatalism that has come to hang over life in this decade: What’s the point of recycling when 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for a third of all carbon emissions? What difference will one vote make in an election? Why fight the Big Data capitalists who are selling our behaviours, desires and very thoughts back to us? Wouldn’t it be easier to just give up and embrace whatever fucked up future is coming our way? Stuck in endless and normalised catastrophe, near-future dystopias can offer us clarifying focus. In Ros Anderson’s novel The Hierarchies, sex, power and desire have become commodified in the form of futuristic sex dolls. Fresh out of a box, one of these dolls, Sylv.ie, has been engineered to be the perfect ‘wife’ for her owner, a man simply referred to as the Husband. Sylv.ie’s life revolves around sex, but she also can engage in witty but polite conversation and play chess – always, of course, allowing the Husband to win. Like Westworld and The Stepford Wives, The Hierarchies
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