Climate change and the zeitgeist. Two stories of our time
Who
is John Truthing? A charismatic figure who holds rallies at which he
urges young Americans to join his movement, Eternity Began Tomorrow,
to challenge a morally bankrupt establishment and defeat climate
change. They flock to his rallies in identical white tracksuits,
swallow a pill called Chillax that makes them feel good, and suck up
his teaching. Truthing, meanwhile, lives rather well. But journalist
Blazes Bolan is on his case.
That’s
the premise of Kevin Brennan’s latest novel, Eternity
Began Tomorrow.
It
sounds a little predictable; feisty young lady journalist unmasks
fake guru’s crooked money-making schemes. Except that Kevin Brennan
is a very good writer, and this book is not
predictable. What happens in the end, not just to Truthing himself
but to Bolan too, is a surprise. And as with all the best fiction,
the reader doesn’t foresee it but it seems entirely logical once it
happens.
Brennan is an editor as well as a writer. He lives in northern California and is the author of a number of books. I had read one of his before – it was Fascination, an unusual but compelling story of a woman whose husband has apparently committed suicide, but has probably just done a runner. She goes in search of him, and the result is a great road-movie-in-writing as she travels across the western USA with a private detective who is secretly in love with her. Fascination is bursting with picaresque characters and odd incidents, but there’s a serious theme. The book is really about searching – on the surface for some superficial thing, but actually for who you are.
Eternity Began Tomorrow is a good read too, as Blazes chases down the truth about Chillax,Truthing and his movement – a pursuit that takes her to a mad chemist in Puglia, a front company in Lichtenstein and Truthing’s palatial HQ in Taos. It’s well-paced and hard to put down, but it’s more than just a good thriller; here too there’s an undercurrent. The theme of seeking something intangible is there again, but perhaps more important, this book is fiercely contemporary. It’s set against the background of the 2020 Democratic primaries, and is so up-to-the-minute that you realise Brennan must have finished the book just days before it went on sale. Moreover Blazes herself is very much of our time. She writes for a website, not a newspaper – something that will resonate with those of us who get our news from the Daily Beast or Huffington Post or, if we do read newspapers, read their online edition. That’s me to a T; I read the New York Times, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian, but online. I haven’t bought the papers for years.
But what really makes this book so “now” is that Brennan is confronting very immediate questions of the nature of charisma and leadership – topics that are now more important than they have been for 75 years. In a recent interview with writer and editor Susan Toy for her excellent website, Authors-Readers International, Brennan explains that Eternity Began Tomorrow is about climate change, our failure to deal with it, and the way that failure may open us up to some messianic leader such as Truthing – something of which we’d best beware.
I think Brennan is on the money. We’ve got used to seeing charismatic leaders who endanger democracy as a threat coming from the right, and so far they have. But the wave of disillusionment amongst the young could have unforeseen consequences. Eternity Began Tomorrow wins its spurs as a good story and a great read. But there is a hell of a lot going on under the surface.
*
CLIMATE
change is also a theme of my second book, Alison Layland’s
excellent Riverflow.
Layland
lives on the borders of Wales and England and is a translator as well
as a writer, working with German and French – and, unusually for
someone originally from England, in Welsh; in 2002 she won first
prize at the National Eistedfodd for a short story in the language.
She’s the author of two novels. The first, Someone
Else’s Conflict
(2014), was a thriller centred on the Balkan conflict and its legacy.
Her second, Riverflow,
came out last year. Like Brennan’s latest, it is bang up-to-date
and captures the zeitgeist, and the angst over climate change, very
well.It’s set in the western part of England, sometimes known as the Marches, that is next to Wales. Layland lives in this region and knows it well. It is beautiful. In the summer of 1972 a friend and I rode across it on racing bikes and pushed on into Wales. Snowdonia was steep and exciting and yet it is not the mountains I remember, but a very long day’s right across the Marches, that great long stretch of Shropshire and other counties that most English people barely know. Half a century ago it was perhaps less crowded than it is now. We crossed a series of steep hills and deep valleys, following a tangled skein of narrow lanes, through half-forgotten villages, past farmhouses where black-and-white collies lay in wait between the gateposts, seemingly asleep but springing up as we passed and barking and chasing off the wheeled invaders. It was a soft overcast day of deep greens and greys. Even now, 48 years later, that day is somehow England in my mind. But the region is dominated by the River Severn, which rises in Wales. It floods.
It is in Shropshire that Layland has set Riverflow. The book starts with a mysterious death. Joe Sherwell’s been drowned, swept away by the river in flood. It was an accident. Or was it? So far as his nephew Bede and his partner Elin know, it was. But there’s a sense of unease. Then a year or two later strange things start happening that suggest that they too could be in danger. Could the answer lie in a long-ago family quarrel?
Riverflow works on two levels. The first is that it’s a well-planned thriller. If you like a good old-fashioned whodunnit, you’ll like this. Layland has the knack that the classic detective writers had of scattering just enough clues for the reader to stay just ahead of the narrative – but not too far, so that at some point you’ll realize who the villain really is and will kick yourself for not spotting it earlier. The second level, though, is what makes this book a bit out of the ordinary. Like Brennan, Layland has tapped into the zeitgeist – a world in which everyone is profoundly worried about climate change, but seems powerless to challenge it.
Riverflow takes place in an acutely-observed modern rural England. It’s set in a village by the Severn in which the current culture wars are very visible. Bede and Elin are environmentalists who are appalled by the rich landowner nearby who’s trying to get fracking started on his land. There are other recognizable characters too – the sustainable energy guy, the landowner’s kind but circumspect old mother, the teenage daughter of divorcees who can’t stand her mother’s new lover. This book might be put together like a classic detective story, but the characters are bang up-to-date. Meanwhile climate change and the threat of another flood are a constant background.
If I had a reservation about this book, it was Bede. His heart is in the right place but he is not as sympathetic as he could be, having super-strong views about the environment and not caring, or maybe not realising, that he can make others uncomfortable in his presence. In particular, his wife and the teenage daughter of a neighbour both show him real kindness and get a bad-tempered response. But maybe Layland knew what she was doing here. Books in which the “good ’uns” are too nice can be a bit flat. I wonder, too, if Layland is trying to tell us something here; again, she has tapped into the zeitgeist, and realises that we do not always communicate with those with whom we do not agree and who might, given time, give us a hearing.
Riverflow could hardly be more relevant. When it was published last year, the Severn hadn’t actually flooded since 2007. But in February 2020 it did. As I write this, towns and villages in Shropshire and Herefordshire are flooded and there is more to come, with flooding also in Scotland, and parts of north-west England getting more than a month’s rain in just two days. Flooding is, of course, not just about climate change; it’s also about the speed of runoff, the result of land-use patterns that we can (hopefully) change. But what is happening is more sinister than that.
Brennan and Layland have seen the threats that confront us, and understand how they are messing with our minds. Sometimes fiction has a function. These authors know that. The fact that these two books are also great reads is a bonus.
