Today’s Observer features an interesting little piece from the paper’s science editor, Robin McKie. It almost sounds like he is picking up on our vagrant meme without realising it; his piece often reads like a call for precisely the kind of thing the Dark Mountain Project has been set up to do. This paragraph, in particular, could almost have come from our manifesto:
Until now, scientists, journalists and politicians have dominated the debate about the threat of greenhouse warming. Many have fought well and brought a proper sense of urgency to the debate. However, it will be our writers, artists and playwrights who will finally delineate the crisis and explore in human terms what lies ahead. Only then can we hope to come to terms with our endangered world
It’s a heartening piece. The only thing that irks me about it, in fact (aside from his assumption that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is about climate change, which I think is dead wrong) is McKie’s use of novelist Ian McEwan as one of the potential spearheads of this new movement to save humanity from global doom through the use of ‘culture.’
When I first got together with Dougald Hine, my fellow conspirator in the genesis of the Dark Mountain project, we knew nothing about each other. Dougald contacted me after I wrote a blog post despairing at the state of the media and determining to start something new. When we first met, neither of us knew if we would have enough in common to make this work. But it soon turned out that we had one thing which would bind us inextricably together: a shared loathing of Ian McEwan.
McEwan, over the last few years, seems to have been nominated by the guardians of our high culture (the broadsheets, Radio Four and the kind of people who hang around at Soho literary parties) as the Grand Old Man of contemporary letters. Every new novel is pored over and dissected in the TLS by professors of literature. McEwan is interviewed glowingly in broadsheet culture sections, and given thousands of words to muse ponderously on weighty subjects like September 11th or climate change. His utterances are quoted reverently by the kind of people who think that straight-bat banalities become profundities when uttered by novelists rather than cabbies.
And the whole thing is a fraud. That someone as dull and weightless as McEwan can be christened as some kind of literary godhead just shows how callow and flaccid the English novel is at this moment in history. McEwan is a man with nothing to say, who says it at great length, and is admired for it by people who have nothing to say either and enjoy reading about others like themselves. His style is as conservative as his worldview, which is narrrow, secular and bourgeois to a tee. He represents everything that the Dark Mountain Project stands against.
A few years back I lived for a couple of weeks in a tiny bothy by an isolated Scottish loch. I was there to concentrate on finishing a novel, which consequently languished in my bottom drawer and still does. The only books in the bothy, apart from mine, were five novels of McEwan’s. I’d never read him before, so I read them all. They were not quite as bad as mine, but they came close.
Every Ian McEwan novel has the same plot. The opening chapter introduces you to the central character: a dull middle-aged man who lives either in London or the home counties. This man knows about fine wine and the English canon, has a pained and yet essentially dull relationship with a pained and yet essentially dull woman, and spends much of his time musing clunkily on Life and how to live it.
After a chapter or so of this, the reader rightly concludes that this man is ripe for a kicking, and is thus pleased then the kicking turns up, usually in chapters two or three. A sudden, horrible event occurs in the man’s life: his daughter is kidnapped, he witnesses a death, somebody steals his bottle of Mouton Rothschild ‘63, which he neglected to insure. The rest of the book explores how the results of this tragedy play out in every aspect of his life.
If it sounds potentially interesting, be warned: it never is. None of McEwan’s characters ever break free of their suffocatingly ponderous little worlds, and as their creator gets older and more garlanded with awards, his characters grow more pompous and conservative with him. In Saturday, McEwan’s take on the Iraq war, the hero is a wealthy, middle-aged, squash-playing surgeon, whose distaste for the raw anger of anti-war protesters leads him to do bugger-all for 400 pages other than ponder about war, society, the complexity of being human and whether to have red or white with dinner.
Now we read that the bard is taking on the subject of climate change:
Ian McEwan is now completing a novel about a flawed but brilliant scientist, Michael Beard, who discovers how to derive power from artificial photosynthesis and so save humanity from global warming. Crucially, climate change is merely “the background hum of the book,” says McEwan. Its focus will hinge, instead, on Beard’s character: will he save the world or will his character failings ruin the day? If the former, we will have been rescued by a deeply unappetising individual but then, as McEwan says: “It isn’t angels necessarily who are going to save us.”
And sure enough, all the tropes are there. Human cleverness will save the day; but hey, it will be laced with a bit of moral complexity too. There’s no doubt that the day will be saved, of course, by clever, liberal, agnostic, intellectual, north London futurephiliacs who oddly resemble their creator in every respect; but it’s important, along the way, to engage with some banalities disguised as wisdom. ‘It isn’t angels necessarily who are going to save us.’ Hmm. You know Ian, you are so right. It takes a novelist to come up with something like that, eh? If Proust were here he’d be weeping blood with envy.
This, my friends, is the best English letters can come up with as the world waltzes open-eyed towards the brink. Can we do better? We’d better.
I’d suggest Iain Sinclair as a palliative to the Middle England angst of Ian MacEvan. Sinclair’s controlled invective is scapel sharp in it’s dissection of UK plc.
(Great website by the way)
I still think Atonement is an amazing piece of writing.
Wierd. Not only factually grossly inaccurate (eg the Cement Garden and The Innocent have nothing like the formulaic repeated plot you describe), but proffering a kind of adolsecent ‘I don’t like him’ as something erudite and worthy and generalised.
I like Mcewan quite a lot. He’s a very powerful, weighty and sophisticated writer . And since the general tone of your post is essentially little more than an affective outburst, that statement will suffice to contradict it.
Jip – I bow to your knowledge of the Cement Garden, which I haven’t read. But that novel is decades old. At least his last six have followed the same formula.
My post, while certainly strong, was also detailed and explanatory. There’s nothing adolescent about it; it’s a critique of a writer who I believe to be grossly overrated. I would very much like to read a robust defence of the Grand Old Man: but simply to call him ‘powerful, weighty and sophisticated’ with nothing more to add is not much of a defence. The last word, in particular, is the kind of word people use often about writers like McEwan, as if simply the act of using it was enough to silence doubters. Without definition or example it is nothing more than received opinion.
McEwan has been described by others as a technically accomplished writer but a failed artist: a man with nothing to say who says it in a polished way. Not a bad description, though I personally find his prose as plodding as his worldview. To me, he is the father of what has been rightly called Establishment Literary Fiction by Mark Thwaite. Thwaite’s dissection of On Chesil Beach is a great summary of the McEwan Machine:
The Road not a novel about climate change? I hate to disagree with the co-begetter of this excellent Dark Mountain Project, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
Read the book literally and, yes, you could say that it wasn’t a book about climate change because the narrator clearly hints at some kind of single-event cataclysm. A nuclear accident? Maybe. A meteor strike? Nothing explicitly refers to global warming.
In fact, the scientific scenario McCarthy based the book on was the earth passing through a comet tail. The atmosphere would literally burn – which is pretty much what we learn has happened in the book. McCarthy came across this idea at a science conference on possible catastrophic disaster events… something that was revealed in a Rolling Stone interview he did a couple of years ago.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not about climate change: the opposite in fact. In fact you could say every apocalyptic novel written today is about climate change whether consciously or not. But I think it’s clear that McCarthy wrote this novel with the apocalyptic vision of climate change very clearly in his mind. He is a science junkie and is very well aware of what’s going on. The Rolling Stone interview I mentioned earlier took place while McCarthy was attending a conference on climate change at the Santa Fe Institute. When the interviewer expressed his surprise that so many people were there at the conference, McCarthy snapped back, “Of course it’s relevant! We’re all going to die.”
So why didn’t McCarthy say “This is a novel about climate change?” Because the idiom he writes in is not one that lingers long over backstory. From Hemmingway through to Carver, this dirty realist style of writing deals with politics deliberately obliquely. The asthtic world of this genre is dominated by “Show don’t tell”. Grand discursions on climate change, and the mechanics by which this occured don’t fit such a hair shirt, puritan picture.
All McCarthy wants to do is get us to a state where humanity is ending so that we’re forced to imagine what that hell would be like. He doesn’t want us distracted by the scientific mechanics of various scenarios, or to start thinking about who’s guilty and who’s not in an Age of Stupid-kind of way. So he choses a simple device to get us there. He has deliberately picked something outside of human agency because what he wants us most of all to do is to think, Oh shit. How would I behave? What does it mean to be good in such a world?
But running powerfully through the book is the tragic reminder of what a broken planent will look like. Look how it ends: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
A thing which could not be put back.
I was talking to David Buckland of Cape Farewell last year and he mentioned that Ian McEwan was writing a book about climate change (which turns out to be not so true, as McEwan has distanced himself from the preposition “about” as your quote above shows) and so I mentioned The Road. Buckland was instantly dismissive of McCarthy’s novel. He said it was a “disgraceful” book. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to ask why at the time but I suspect it’s because the book appears to be so irredeemably pessimistic.
There is a commonly held belief that art should reflect the idea that without hope we will never change. I think this is a mistake. Art is not a public service broadcast, and the reader understands that. On a factual level I have some understanding of how terrible a world with a four or five degree temperature rise will be. On a factual level too I know I should be doing something about it. But narrative connects the facts to something deeper, and for me, anyway, something that makes those facts belong to me. As a parent, the Road kept me awake at night. But there is nothing wrong with being frightened. You’d be an idiot not to be scared.
And that’s what I like about the Dark Mountain Project; it understands that without a new story, nothing’s to change.
So admit it, you’re wrong, OK?
(Not about McEwan, of course. I’m with there. A great talent wasted on toying with form.)
Thanks for coming back on this, Will. Let battle commence!
There are a few problems I have with this line of argument, but let’s start from the beginning. For me, The Road is, in one sense, absolutely nothing new at all. It is the latest in a very long line of apocalyptic novels, whose self-set mission is to imagine ‘where humanity is ending.’ You could trace this back as far as you like. Perhaps we could start with Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’(1820s: plague), then move through Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1950s: nuclear war), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1950s: er, the death of grass), Steven King’s The Stand (1970s: plague again), Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980s: more nukes again), Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake (1990s: GM viruses) …
Anyway, you get the point – and the point is that each time, a particular device is used to get us to the point where we have to contemplate the post-civilisational carnage, and usually this device is conveniently rapid: viruses and nuclear strikes move us very quickly onto the stuff about the moral dilemmas, the collapse of social frameworks, the eating of children etc etc etc.
McCarthy’s is one of the finest books in this genre, for he is a very fine writer indeed. But it is not, to me, ‘about’ climate change at all – unless we want to adopt your very loose suggestion that everything terrible is in some way ‘about’ it. The point about climate change is that is precisely not a single, terrible apocalyptic event waiting for us at some time in the future, but an ongoing process of which we are already part. If we start to buy into the ‘climate change as apocalypse’ narrative, all we are doing is tying our protestant, European, apocalypse-seeking souls into the more complex ecological reality.
This is not to suggest that climate change will not be terrible; it is a terrible thing which may have disastrous impacts. But it will not be the single, swift event so beloved of such novelists, and of our culture as a whole. To buy into that is to sell ourselves short.
Why? Well, precisely because we then set ourselves up with the very dichotomy that the Dark Mountain Project is trying to move us away from: that we either have liberal capitalism with windfarms (ie, an upgraded present), or we have an atmosphere-free world in which we have to eat babies. These are not the choices open to us, but if we read The Road as a climate change narrative in this way, that’s how it appears. I agree with you, happily so, that false hope is wasted hope and that we need to face up to the reality of what the future is likely to bring. And it may well be terrible. But not this terrible, and not in this way.
Finally, The Road to me is, more than anything else, a story about a man and his son, and how they relate to each other when everything else has been stripped away. Climate change is not going to bring this world about: even the direst IPCC scenario doesn’t suggest it. If McCarthy has wanted to write, with all his scientific knowledge, about what global warming will do, he could have done so. But he chose not to. Metaphor then, perhaps, and symbolism of all kinds and yes, that sense of looming doom which is utterly relevant to our times. But I can’t read it as any more than that.
I think Paul is right; ‘The Road’ is not about climate change because climate change is an unfolding process and this book really shows nothing of the process, cause or affect. The road could equally well have been set against a background of cannibalistic tribalism in any harsh environment. I think it might have been a better book if it had been.
One book that does show a process of change, though not explicitly for climate change in the sense of AGW, is ‘Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang’ (Kate Wilhelm). This tells a generational story of survival of adverse change. If I remember right, it was written pre- global warming, or at least before the term was generally known.
I forget the actual cause of the change or even if it is actually stated. This book actually has a plot though, whereas the plot of ‘The Road’ seems to be ‘must go south, must go south’. I keep waiting to this element of ‘The Road’ to develop into something, but it never did. It was the first McCarthy that I have read though, so perhaps my expectations were wrong. Wilheim’s book also contains conflict between technofixism and back-to-basics adaptionism.
Yes, it is quite 1950’s sci-fi and the writing does seem to go a bit awry in the middle, when the plot seems to dominate the prose, but it is pretty good book even so. I don’t know whether it qualifies as ‘literature’ but as Paul hints, much of what makes the grade clearly isn’t, and much that is good gets ignored.
Another example of environmental change as a process, though on a shorter timescale, is H.G. Wells’ short story ‘The Star’. Another possibility, which I haven’t read, is his ‘In the Days of the Comet’.
(Hmmm… wonder if I got my ‘affects’ and ‘effects’ right.)
[...] to Monbiot’s love of McCarthy’s The Road as evidence of Monbiot’s own millenarianism. Kingsnorth and I have been disagreeing about that book (see comments); he doesn’t think it’s about climate change at all. It’s one of those arguments where the [...]
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[...] a sidenote, Paul Kingsnorth and I have disagreed elsewhere about whether Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road is a novel primarily about climate change. Gray’s [...]
[...] a sidenote, Paul Kingsnorth and I have disagreed elsewhere about whether Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road is a novel primarily about climate change. Gray’s [...]
[...] Mountain Project a decent amount of space to explain itself. Our only complaint is that he quoted Ian McEwan first. But we are not going to be churlish about it, because we are not churlish [...]
[...] to read a blog by one of the project’s founders, Paul Kingsnorth, with the following title: “Ian McEwan Must Die. Metaphorically Speaking.” Those of you who know me or who have followed this blog for a good while will also know that, to [...]
[...] on McEwan being able to write about climate were pessimistic until I came across Paul Kingsnorth of The Dark Mountain Project writing about [...]
[...] McEwan being able to write about climate were pessimistic until I came across Paul Kingsnorth of The Dark Mountain Project writing about [...]
[...] McEwan being able to write about climate were pessimistic until I came across Paul Kingsnorth of The Dark Mountain Project writing about [...]