Writing Catastrophe

In one sense, the contemporary literary writer has been playing catch-up with the science fiction community in its willingness to write about ‘catastrophe’. Yet in the last couple of years novels by Cormac MacCarthy, A.M. Homes and others have written novels where ‘the end of the world’ or ‘natural disasters’ play a major part. I want to consider the nature of ‘apocalypse’ in contemporary fiction and whether or not this is no longer the speculative writing of the SF community, but a realistic approach to the age we live in.

Catastrophe is the easiest of landscapes for the speculative writer. It allows for invention — both in terms of description and — occasionally — in terms of language; it provides an enclosed logical proposition; and furthermore it avoids direct engagement with the present ‘state of the world.’ For another kind of writer, dealing with the world that we live in: the catastrophe has to be sought out. There is none of the unavoidable reality present in Hemingway, Huxley and Waugh or - later — Mailer and Vidal, writing about wars that touched every member of their class. Our contemporary western catastrophes, in turn, are nervy ones; primarily - though not entirely — existential. They are ‘dinner party’ catastrophes, open to middle-class discussion, but not likely to require middle-class action. For much of the late 20th century, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the potential of a third World War, provided this existential problem. I remember, in the mid-eighties, at the height of the Thatcher-Reagan anxiety crisis (though already long after the real crises of the fifties and early sixties had played out), my Australian-based uncle suggesting that my parents send me and my sister out to their antipodean haven. It was the logic of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, fixed, however briefly, into a real existential insanity.

If CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was peaking in its popularity in the mid-Thatcher/Reagan period, for a certain mindset of writer, both the possibility and language of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ were almost pornographically alluring. Martin Amis’s flawed but brilliant London Fields is the high-water mark of this period of ‘dread.’ That I refer to it as a ‘middle class’ dread is because of its non-catastrophic nature, or rather, if World War III had happened it wouldn’t have happened to the Jews, or the working classes, or the English, or the Third World, it would have happened indiscriminately to everyone. For some writers that indiscriminate universality was both the central fear of the time, and also a highly seductive muse.

There is no real catastrophe in London Fields; only the fear of an impending one, and that, for Amis, was enough. There were eighties writers coming to terms with real apocalypse (for instance, the AIDS epidemic) though perhaps not yet writing about it. (Thom Gunn’s The Man With the Night Sweats came out in 1993, the same year as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the film version of Randy Shilts 1987 history of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On). Perhaps with the west undergoing an unprecedented period of peace (at least on its own American and European homelands), the idea of ‘catastrophe’ had become an uncomfortable indulgence in a comfortable world.

Yet, White Noise, Don DeLillo’s eighth novel, released in 1985, had the same sense of dread as you find in London Fields. Both White Noise and London Fields are comic novels, though the comedy is pointedly expressing a less than humorous point. White Noise is the subtler in terms of its targets. DeLillo’s writing about ‘The Department of Hitler Studies’ for instance — is this a radical satire? Mel Brooks’ comic masterpiece The Producers had surely done a better job of it seventeen years before with ‘Springtime for Hitler’, and ten or fifteen years on from White Noise, one wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Hitler channel nestled amongst the cookery, lifestyle and sex channels on the cable multiplex. In 2008, the decline in German in schools is being attributed to the endless Hitler imagery of the home multiplex.

The difference — or distinction — between White Noise and London Fields is one of intention. DeLillo is genuinely satirising the ‘toxic air incident’ that is the central catastrophe of the novel; it is a highly plausible absurdity, but for the ciphers in the novel it doesn’t have any more meaning than a liturgical rumour for a medieval peasant. For Amis, the sense, to quote that very British sitcom, Dad’s Army, that ‘we’re all doomed’, becomes a central motif against which his own ciphers can rush to their own personal cliffs. In this sense, it has more to lose than his comic masterpiece Money. In Money the deceipt — the doom — the dread — is a manufactured one, a gap, a gift, a self-delusion (literally) that John Self, its main character perpetuates against himself in the spirit of the age. In London Fields there is nothing that can be done. The die is already cast. It’s a fin de siècle book before its time (though the millennium looms large) where the overhanging dread is inevitable, desperate. His other key book of the period, Time’s Arrow, takes the real catastrophe of Nazi Germany, and a ‘Nazi doctor’, and replays the life, mercilessly, in reverse. If there’s a sense of chill in reading some of Amis’s best work, this is where it comes from. There’s no sense that his characters have free will even as they hurtle to their own apparently self-determined destructions.

Though the apocalyptic threat is there as early as Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Wyndham’s Chocky, it is the contemporary playing out of it that makes London Fields or White Noise so fascinating. Yet these novels seem, in retrospect, to be out of step with their times. They share a sense that the age of materialism that produced them must and should have a dark side; the age possibly disagreed. In the US and the UK, the Reagan-Thatcher years, roughly coinciding with the decade they dominated, were — still are — polarising. The real victims of those times are nearly invisible in its fiction; it is the fall from grace of the era’s winners that interests the satirist. In marked contrast, J.M. Coetzee in The Lives and Times of Michael K (1983) didn’t need to make anything up, his hero was the lowest of the low in a country that had already systemised its population through apartheid. A writer like Coetzee was living through an obvious catastrophe, and could use that in his work; in the west, we had to manufacture our own, (or else, God forbid, write about what was really happening in Sheffield and Manchester).

It seems strange that it has taken so long for the ecological threats that we face — and which speculative writers (The World in Winter, The Kraken Wakes, The Drowned World, Make Room! Make Room!) have long understood — to have the same impact on our general fictions. I would say that this is partly a generational thing, partly a result of intellectual palate-cleansing occasioned by the real attacks of 9/11, and partly something a little less honourable; that willingness to take on a useful trope to sell books. It seems that even before Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans, or the Boxing Day tsunami hit the Philippines, the sense that ecological catastrophe was now what a nuclear or toxic catastrophe had been to a previous generation had become mainstreamed. Films such as The Day After Tomorrow, however schlockly, and polemics such as An Inconvenient Truth have created a mainstreaming of contemporary apocalypse. It is always the Statue of Liberty underwater (and it is always the Statue of Liberty; just remember 1968’s Planet of the Apes). Yet in writing apocalypse a number of contemporary writers seem to be doing something that is, yes, a useful trope, but also a telling allegory, something not now speculative but on the edges of probability. It is once again the satirists, Will Self in The Book of Dave and A.M. Homes in This Book Can Save Your Life, who are now using flood — biblical, ecological, you take your pick — as both a central metaphor for our times and as a useful plot dénouement. It is worth recalling that had the flood not come to sweep away the Tullivers in The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot would have been left with a plot that was, for its time, socially impossible. Because, in the contemporary western milieu, there is no real consequence for the middle classes — then a flood satisfies all the novelist’s requirements by washing it away.

The novelist, reflecting both the paranoias of the time, and amplifying them through a more localised concern (both as a personal statement and as having resonance with a readership that is reasonably clearly defined in terms of class, age, wealth and nationality), has engaged with the times s/he lives in by placing their recognisable protagonists in a position of real peril that mirrors the existential peril of the times. Whereas in the early 1980s, this placing was manifested via the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust, in the 21st century it is primarily environmental catastrophe that provides the dual purpose of a believable fate and a safely moderated ratcheting up of the readers’ fears. We are looking in the glass and seeing our worst fears facing back at us.

Yet I don’t think I am intending a negative by pointing this out. If the novel is distinctly secular, how does it encompass a spiritual dimension in an age where the religious instinct is seen either as simplistic or dangerous? Science — in the form of the atom bomb — and nature both perform this higher purpose. If you read Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set on the day of the Stop the War march in London in 2003, you are struck by how in many ways the backdrop is merely colour. War is near enough (‘not in our name’) to create this great mass protest, but also far enough away that once the gesture of a million people on the streets is over, the politicians continue anyway. Indeed, both the ‘war leaders’, Bush and Blair, were actually re-elected afterwards. The catastrophe, when it came, was not being felt on a daily basis in Kensington or Washington, but in Baghdad.

So how does a novelist translate the paranoia of those few weeks into a fiction? McEwan, a master of dread, provides a highly resonant micro-story. When Henry Perowne’s family are kidnapped in their own house, there is a mirroring of the existential fears of that day and time, to something that his audience would be immediately receptive to. The great middle class dread: being surprised in your own home by a psychopathic stranger. Yet it’s perhaps no surprise that McEwan is also planning a novel about the effects of climate change. It will be interesting to see if he follows recent novels by Will Self and A.M. Homes in writing about ‘flood’.

Will Self has frequently worked to juxtapose the everyday world in his fictions with a bigger conceit. In The Book of Dave he successfully creates a two-tier story that extrapolates the paranoia about ‘the world today’ into a caustic, medievalised future ruled by a primitive and brutalistic religion that has come down from ‘the book of Dave’, an insane archive from his parallel story about misanthropic taxi driver Dave Rudman. In the contemporary segments the threat of global warming may be everywhere but is ignored; we carry on as ever — our own dramas, death, divorce, debt — far more important than anything else. A taxi driver is a perfect carrier for Self’s message, since he is no more than the link person between different lives — a pipe, if you like, through which commerce travels. In the future, England is reduced to a few hilly rumps. The catastrophe has happened and, with it, we are reduced to parodies of religion, parodies of family life, parodies of our many centuries of civilisation and progress. Self has propelled us back into the dark ages. In A.M. Homes’ This Book Can Save Your Life it is the Los Angeles setting of her characters that is at risk. But, you have to ask, what is there left to destroy? Her central character, Richard Novak, has been infantilised by his wealth. His wife and family are estranged, and even everyday tasks, such as his exercise regime and his macrobiotic diet, are commercialised. The book’s title, a play on the ‘self help’ manual phenomenon, is highly ironic. Novak, bored, marginalised within his own existence, one day steps out into the world, with all its risks and uncertainties. The fissure that opens up underneath his house is a forewarning; for Los Angeleans are well aware of the precarious nature of their underlying geology. An earthquake is — as scientists will tell you — inevitable at some point in California. Homes’ novel makes the point that it could be as soon as tomorrow.

From this, we come inevitably to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We are unsure here what the disaster is, only that it is devastating, total, and hasn’t yet shown any signs of renewal. His ‘gaia’ is almost beyond repair. The only thing that matters is that humanity, faced with certain death and extinction, will continue until that point. A man and his son are walking along a road, their destination uncertain. They have been walking, not for days, but for years. In the film of P.D. James’ Children of Men the birth of a new child is seen as being almost messianic, an ageing hope-free population rejuvenated by the possibility of life. In The Road the child seems to embody something more like despair. His father keeps a bullet for the time when he might have to kill his own son, in order that he is not left alone.

In The Road the Dark Ages are upon us, and there is only the faintest possibility that the end will be delayed and that somewhere in a future where the ash lifts, there will be anyone left to take advantage of it. With the sun all but blocked out by ash, life itself is close to extinction. Here, there is no comfort to be had in the possibilities ahead for the nameless man and boy. They are heading south, to the sea, in perhaps the only concession to hope in the book. Perhaps, at the edge of the land, there will be something ‘other’ than what they have. It is the logic of any starving peoples (or animal packs) to search for where the land might provide them with some kind of life.

The apocalypse, we feel, reading The Road, will be like this; beyond remorseless, almost beyond imagination. At times, this bleakness almost suffocates the story. After all, it is a ‘survivors’ tale’, yet survival requires something of hope: the daily struggle to find food and water is potential a banal one because we have entered the story of their struggle close to its ending, not the start — and this is what is most terrifying. It is as if we’ve begun at the last day in the wilderness, not at the first, but since ‘days’ no longer have meaning, the last day is in itself endless.

All apocalyptic tales are, in the end, similar. Whether it’s A.M. Homes waiting for the Los Angeles earthquake, or McCarthy’s man and boy, surviving on tinned peaches long after the conflagration. We, as readers, are both immune to the terror — our world is only distantly reflected by these threats — and drawn in by the dread — our hard-won comforts mean we will have further to fall if, or when, disaster occurs. What is taking place is a shift in the novelistic perspective, a desire to shake us out of complacency. In novels such as Roth’s The Human Stain or Coetzee’s Disgrace there is still the possibility that a carefully-built life can be undone through a single revelation or a particular incident. But this becomes less believable in the modern age, where every sin is forgivable, every career redeemable. There is little moral hazard in anything we do — if we have the money and support mechanisms that will provide for us — so that the worst that can happen is a realignment. Would a contemporary writer do what Wolfe did in Bonfire of the Vanities and create a new Sherman McCoy to illustrate the ‘credit crunch’? It seems unlikely, for Wolfe’s Master of the Universe was undone by his human failings as much as by the forces expanding around him.

The contemporary writer is drawn to these apocalyptic scenarios and the reader accepts them, because they appeal to our sense of the world being far more complex than we can comprehend — and therefore beyond our control — whilst assuaging our guilt at ‘not doing enough.’ The globalised media means that every disaster is immediately relayed around the world. It is no longer enough to pretend to be in the dark about what’s going on. Global warming, in particular, provides a scenario that is both real and abstract, and by writing about catastrophe, our novelists are both reflecting our fears, and building a range of scenarios, however dreadful, that we are only just beginning to contemplate.