“If each generation grapples with its own apocalypse, mine is facing the terror of climate change,” says Fernanda Trías, in an author’s note for the Uruguayan’s award-winning novel Pink Slime. That terror comes with inequality and environmental change, and the ways in which communities navigate the consequences of climate change are becoming fertile ground for fiction writers.
In the novel, a nameless protagonist leads a tenuous existence in a port city, as unstoppable algal blooms bring with them suffocation and plague, the waterways choking around those who are too poor to migrate inland and those who are too sick to leave. A red wind flays the stragglers alive; the tainted bodies of the infected are shredded down to raw muscle.
For all that the environment depicted is one of fundamental change, the main character exists in a curious sort of stasis. She’s earned enough to buy her way to a better life, acting as caretaker for Mauro, a child with a genetic condition that makes him eat constantly. But freedom from him, and from the city, doesn’t appear all that attractive. Instead, she prevaricates, and the two relationships that keep her locked in place – a mother for whom disaster is no reason to stop constant criticism, and an ex-husband who is infected by the red wind but incapable of dying from it – are neither strong enough to get her to stay nor awful enough to encourage departure.
Loyalty has become more habit than feeling, and the most interesting thing about this holding pattern is how indifferent it is to apocalypse. If the algae hadn’t come, if the red wind wasn’t so vicious and devastating, then those maternal and marital relationships would likely be unchanged. There’s often a narrative expectation that apocalypse comes with high emotion, with the dramatic cementing or severing of bonds, but the stoic, somewhat depressive affect of Pink Slime’s protagonist is an argument for continuity – or, perhaps, for redundancy. What’s the point of resisting change if the fundamentals remain the same? How can anyone advocate for positive change for others if they can’t do so for themselves? Environmental change has destroyed a city and yet the behaviour that led to that change continues unabated, through the conspicuous, uncontrolled consumption echoed by Mauro, and the inability of people to meaningfully connect to others in ways that don’t reek of exploitation. One can hardly blame the protagonist for her increasingly why-bother attitude. When surviving alongside the rest of a fracturing community entails continuing unhealthy patterns of behaviour, then remaining to experience environmental horror alone, might actually be a valid choice.
It’s exhausting to be an advocate, especially when it seems to do so little good. Tim Jones’s Emergency Weather notes of the so-called Minister of Resilience that he was “so confident in his usual environment, he was having a hard time adjusting to radically altered circumstances”.
Emergency Weather, which concerns three people in the capital facing a massive storm after earlier extreme weather events, also reminds readers that climate change consists of layers of trauma. It’s never a single disaster, but many stacked atop each other.
For all the terrifying events of the novel, it’s the small tragedies that bring home just how comprehensive those effects are likely to be. The farmer who commits suicide in the face of financial ruin; the young siblings split up because their home is destroyed in a slip and no single relative can house them all together. The pets that die. The useless conversations. The exhaustion. The repetition. As Stephanie, a scientist stuck in endless focus groups, notes: “Unlike an earthquake, where the aftershocks would eventually taper away, the hammer blows of climate change would keep coming, one after another after another, harder and harder, society’s ability to respond declining as each blow built on the last.”
New Zealand has had its share of devastating weather recently, and still the general lack of willingness to truly address climate change is marked. Yet Emergency Weather lacks the anonymity of Pink Slime, and this may be where resilience truly lies. The flooding, the landslides, the storms – we see them on the pages as we see them on the news, happening to people just like us, people we know. It shouldn’t make a difference, that knowledge, but it does. We are a small country, one where we still have the capacity to see each other, whether we’re farmers or scientists or angry, dislocated kids. We have the capacity to pull together. The future, these novels suggest, does not have to be indifference and abandonment.
