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Climate Change Fiction Melts Away Just When It’s Needed

It’s the most urgent problem of our era, but novelists appear singularly reluctant to address it

“Guys, the ice caps are melting now,” wrote Chris Ross in the Guardian Review last year. “Where are those stories?”

The review’s subject was a collection of short stories, I’m With the Bears, all on the issue of climate change. It featured good writing – from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Lydia Millet – but, as Ross put it, “much of this material seems to have been lifted from the wastebasket.” Why was no one writing fresh fiction about it?

One year on, the question still stands. “In spite of the stakes,” said Andrew Simms on the Guardian’s environment blog the other day, “the issue has receded from the political frontline like a wave shrinking down a beach.” It seems that the wave never quite reached our beach – the beach of fiction writing – in the first place.

Sure, there was Solar. Ian McEwan’s 2010 satire of a balding, overweight scientist with marriage problems explicitly focused on “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”. That’s the one everyone could probably mention. But after that? There was mainly silence (if you leave aside poetry, where much more seems to be going on, most notably, perhaps, Tom Chivers’ ADRIFT project).

There’s apocalyptic fiction, of course, and you could, I suppose, connect a novel such as Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood to climate change. But is this type of literature really concerned with the issue, or does a vaguely related scenario merely serve as a purpose for other themes and situations? (Also, as environmentalists are increasingly keen to point out, climate change isn’t really about the end of the world at all; it’s about living conditions becoming harder and harder as we go along.)

Yes, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) touched on the issue (the “greener than Greenpeace” Walter is deeply worried about it), and one could stretch things by considering books such as Joe Dunthorne’s Wild Abandon (2011), which is interested in low-carbon living. A number of childrens’ books are on-topic, too. In Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008), for example, the UK has become the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing. But the kids are alright, really: many are getting climate change much better than the grown-ups do (and, naturally, they’re much more worried about it).

No, it’s we adults who are failing to have this conversation. It’s an unpleasant conversation to have, no doubt about it – and maybe that’s why it’s not really taking place in fiction, at least not centre-stage. Many novels vaguely reference the situation; sentences such as “in a warming world” or “in these times of climate change” are common in much of what’s being published at the moment. But that’s about it.

As such, the portrayal of climate change in fiction might actually be a pretty accurate reflection of what’s going on in the real world. We know about it, and we know it’s a pretty damn serious problem, but engage with it directly? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Isn’t someone else looking into it? We don’t want to have this conversation, it seems; and neither do most characters in most novels being published.

It’s probably also true that climate change is far too complex an issue to write a definitive novel about. But is it too complex an issue for fiction writers to make a contribution? To write not so much a definitive novel about it, but one of many complementary ones? My own attempt at this,From Here (2012), tells the story of a group of ordinary people (a supermarket cashier, an ex-banker, a hipster girl), who’ve come together in an unlikely alliance – realising how this one issue touches them all to the core. It’s full of the contradictions surrounding climate change, and the confusion many people (even those actively involved) feel around it. Telling people that I was working on a story that tackles the issue head-on, and with a clear stance on it, the response I often got was: are you sure? Which, more than once, probably meant: are you completely out of your mind?

There’s a school of thought that says novels shouldn’t (even can’t) be about a very current issue. One could reply that climate change isn’t very current in that sense – it didn’t start yesterday, and it will be with us for a long, long time – but I won’t, because our response to it (or lack thereof) is as current as it gets. But ought that really to prevent us from writing about it?

Zadie Smith beautifully described the dangers of writing fiction that’s grounded in the now in a recent Guardian podcast. People tend to find their own time “uninteresting, vulgar and stupid,” she said, and they will constantly accuse you of “shallowness, because there’s a sense that literature must be timeless”. And yet, the novels that “end up being important to people are the ones which in some way express their time” – provided you’re not simply producing a “springboard to talk about whatever is in the news.”

It’s definitely a fine line, but we need to have this conversation, and I refuse to accept that I’m the only one who believes that fiction can make a massive contribution to it. Novels are about human beings, and it’s one of their great strengths that they can be as open and honest as they wish – about our errors and failures, about our confusions, but also about our deepest wishes and hopes. That’s why they have the power to cut through many of the things that make our coming-to-terms with climate change so hard on a strictly factual level.

What is our fiction, if it’s shying away from “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”? What is our fiction, if all we really strive for is to make some universal statement on humankind, avoiding the messiness that’s the here and now? What is our fiction if, wanting to be timeless, we forget our own times? So, I’m putting this as a question, but also as a provocation: Where are those stories?

“Many children are getting climate change much better than the grown-ups.”