Writing Climate Change: the Novels of Liz Jensen

Western Michigan University, 15th September 2015. Writing climate change: the novels of Liz Jensen I. Liz Jensen’s work: an overview As a preliminary, I would explain that I have tried to adapt my analysis to be suitable to both literary specialists and environmental studies specialists, and it is for this reason that I have concentrated more on ideas than textuality in this particular instance, although I have done a great deal of textual analysis on Jensen’s work in the past. To give a brief overview, Liz Jensen is an increasingly successful contemporary British writer, whose work has been translated into twenty languages. In passing it may be said that her fifth novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, in which a young boy in a coma lives a double life, is currently being made into a Miramax film,1 so it is probable that she will be getting more exposure in the near future. Jensen is the author of eight novels to date, all of which can be categorised as literary thrillers. At first glance, the expression may appear to be a contradiction in terms, since a thriller, by its nature, tells a story, whereas a literary novel, in the wake of postmodernism, tends to be to some extent self- reflexive and to make some commentary on its own textuality – in other words, to be metafictional. 2 Liz Jensen’s novels undoubtedly deploy elements of the popular, drawing on science-fiction, with devices such as genetic manipulation, time travel and thought transference featuring prominently. They may also be considered popular in their engagement with the issues of the day, particularly with ecological crises. However, the 1 Aitken Alexander Associates: directed by Alexandre Aja, produced by Tim Bricknell and Anthony Mingella, and adapted by Anthony Mingella. http://www.aitkenalexander.co.uk , November 26th 2014. 2 Patricia Waugh defines metafiction thus: “(M)etafiction […] simultaneously (creates) a fiction and (makes) a statement about that fiction. The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinction between ‘creation’ and ‘criticism’” (Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. London/New York: Methuen, 1984: 6). The term postmodernism as used here designates the general movement – embracing architecture, cinema, and so on – of which metafiction, a purely literary device, is part. 1 very mixing of genres, and the self-consciousness created by this, with the various parts of the text illuminating and undermining each other, is what lends these novels credibility as serious artefacts. Jensen is very much interested in, and committed to, climate change, and has declared, “More and more, I feel that climate is the only thing worth writing about”. 3 Indeed, eco-literature and ecocriticism are often considered to be among the defining trends of the novel in the twenty-first century. Not all ecothrillers are disaster texts, with some simply foregrounding the natural world. In Egg Dancing and Ark Baby, for example, the natural world, including its animal life, is more than simply background or a setting, but an integral part of the novel, so strong is the relationship between people and place. However, Jensen’s novels have a certain affinity with the recent flowering of eco- apocalyptic texts, as represented by established women writers such as Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and Fay Weldon (Chalcot Crescent), among others. In The Paper Eater, The Rapture and The Uninvited, Jensen conjures up explicitly ecological disasters. Nonetheless, and importantly, Jensen has also declared her desire to write without propaganda.4 Although her work occasionally tends to the didactic, she writes highly imaginative novels, which are very varied in form and style, spanning the genres of realism, fantasy, speculative fiction and science fiction. But Jensen’s is also a unified oeuvre, in terms of a number of concerns: the relationship of humankind with the natural world, gender, utopia-dystopia, apocalypse, and the critique of capitalism, are all recurring themes. Climate change is also a unifying theme in her work: she herself has said that it is central to her output, although of course the critic has the prerogative of reading otherwise, and reading more, as we will see in the final section. For the purposes of this paper, I will refer mainly to The Rapture, the strongest exposition of the climate change theme, and will also mention to a lesser extent three other novels, Ark Baby, The Paper Eater and The Uninvited, all of which fall into the 3 Liz Jensen, in private correspondance. 4 “First of all, I don’t actually think that novels are a vehicle for propaganda, and I don’t think they should be. I use my novels to explore what I don’t know about. I don’t start out with a view on climate change [...] I start out thinking, ok, where can we go with this, what can I do with this that hasn’t been done before, what can I do that’s new for me? The novels I write really are a voyage of discovery. I go in there with the ‘what if?’” Interview with Liz Jensen: Fantasticon 2013 (interview by Martin Schjönning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM_Ph_ZbCiI . 2 category of what the British and French tend to call “ecofiction”, and the Americans “clifi”. 5 To give a quick introduction to the plot of each of these novels, Ark Baby, Jensen’s second novel, published in 1998, has a double time-span: in the Victorian epoch, Tobias, half-man, half-monkey, but brought up by a parson, discovers his true identity, while in the contemporary part of the novel, a plague of infertility is visited on modern- age Britain following a toxic flood brought on, ostensibly, by climate change – although it can be interpreted in other ways, of which more later – and Tobias’s direct descendants, five generations later, prove to be the only two women in the country able to reproduce. This novel thus has an eye on post-humanism as well as climate change. The Paper Eater is a full-blown utopia/dystopia, the only one in Jensen’s oeuvre, and charts the rise and fall of a human-made island, Atlantica, located between Britain and America, which has been set up to treat the waste of the world in an artificial crater, and is billed as an ideal society – until, within a timespan of a few years, the crater implodes, the protagonists are cast out of the island like Adam and Eve from Eden. While these novels undoubtedly foreground climate change, the seventh and eighth novels are part of a projected “climate-change trilogy”. The Rapture (2009), opposes evangelical and ecological visions of the end of the world, while The Uninvited (2012), highlights the perpetuation – or otherwise – of the human race, with a vision of a barely human future generation which fights against capitalism and the destruction of the world, but ends up destroying civilisation, even to language itself. In my study on Liz Jensen, I have defined the (as yet incomplete) trilogy as a “third wave” in Jensen’s work, in which environmental issues are the dominant theme, the first wave having being characterised by the creation of otherworlds in time and space, and the second by the murder mystery, which largely, although not entirely, moves away from climate change as a theme. In what follows, I will first demonstrate how Liz Jensen’s work fits into the clifi template, before asking whether it is possible to “read against” clifi rather than “reading for” it – or at least, reading exclusively for it. My conclusion will examine those ecocritical theories which seem to me the most essential to retain. II. Jensen’s “third wave”: “clifi” Moving on from the murder story of the “second wave”, the “third wave” takes up the detective story but in a new light. Rather than family members playing detective to find out how and why a mother came to kill her newborn daughter during the second 5 This term is attributed to the journalist and writer Dan Bloom. 3 world war, for example (in War Crimes for the Home (2002) part of the second wave), here we have “environmental detectives”, who are neither actual detectives, nor actual environmentalists, but rather people who get caught up in ecological “adventure” (and misadventure). The Rapture is set in an apocalyptic eco-dystopia, in, to borrow Margaret Atwood’s phrase, a “near future” relative to the time of publication, and qualifies for the label of “speculative fiction” in that the dystopian vision it presents is made up of real, or easily realised, circumstances and events; that is, “our” world, although altered, is recognisable. Britain in 2013 in The Rapture is on the very verge of a crisis which is apparently linked to climate change, with drought and freak weather events having become customary. A series of short info-dumps establishes the parameters of the disaster: “The latest projections predict the loss of the Arctic ice cap and a global temperature rise of up to six degrees within Bethany’s lifetime” (ibid., 23). It becomes clear that a battle against the elements is played out on a daily basis, with sunglasses and sunscreen among the absolute necessities carried at all times by the wheelchair-bound protagonist, the psychologist Gabrielle Fox (ibid., 35). This is a world which is no longer evolving, no longer developing or growing, but, rather, is waiting for the end, a recurrent chronotope in Jensen’s work. It is also a world which is rapidly running out of oil, and which has never recovered from the “global financial crisis” of 2008 (ibid., 10), placing this novel within the category of “credit crunch lit”, an identified movement in twenty-first century literature.6 There is no sense of a future, only of a past which has gone drastically wrong – and of uncertainty as to how the now-inevitable end will come about.

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