In darkly interesting times, authors who can satisfy a previously unidentified hunger have the world at their feet. Writing as Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler gave young readers a drug they didn’t know they craved until they tried it. The wild gothic of the Unfortunate Events series was the literary equivalent of a scorpion lollipop: a macabre treat.
Gun-toting rebels seize government buildings, take hostages and appear on state television to announce the overthrow of a “corrupt” regime. The army intervenes, and the insurgents become the heroes of the moment – or its cannon fodder. The BBC arrives. Welcome to the generic coup d’etat.
In literature, nothing dates like tomorrow. The hypothetical readers of the late 21st century may look back on the Armageddon fixation of some of today’s dystopic fiction with an indulgent smile. But they may also be struck by how much of the political and physical landscape they recognise.
That the radically altered world on the horizon has already been envisaged by science presents a challenge to fiction writers conjuring humankind’s future: in an era of melting ice caps and military contingency plans, the issue is no longer what we can imagine; it is what we can’t.
“I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” confesses Rosemary’s mother in Karen Joy Fowler’s wise, provocative and wildly endearing take on family love. Did no one warn Mrs Cooke to be careful what she wished for? Had she any inkling of the family cataclysm her innocent desire would engender, and the complex repercussions her daughter would suffer in its wake?
Rewind to the day back in 1970s Indiana, when narrator-heroine Rosemary is separated from her beloved “twin” sister, Fern, and sent, aged five, for a week’s visit to her grandparents. “I knew the winds of doom when they blew,” Rosemary recalls. She senses that she has committed a heinous crime, for which her punishment is expulsion from the bosom of the family. But no. On her return, it is the thrill-seeking Fern who has been dispatched – never to be seen again. There are no explanations.
Thanks to television drama, every British TV licence-payer now has a passive acquaintance with Danish, and Copenhagen is at its most globally recognised since Hans Christian Andersen’s day. It seems we can’t get enough of the place.
If a Japanese-American writer who is also a Zen Buddhist priest wrote a post-Japanese tsunami novel, what themes might you imagine she would address? Biculturalism, water, death, memory, the female predicament, conscience, the nature of time and tide? Tick. All there. Throw in the second world war, the reader-writer relationship, depression, ecological collapse, suicide, origami, a 105-year-old anarchist nun and a schoolgirl’s soiled knickers, and you have Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for the Time Being.
Climate change: the spectre hanging over every child, is the single most urgent issue of our times – and a challenge to any novelist. But how to write fiction about the Earth’s storm-filled future without a whiff of the pulpit?
Barbara Kingsolver’s paradoxical solution is to set her story on a sheep farm in the depressed Bible Belt. By recruiting traditional images of Heaven, Hell and sacrificial lambs to convey the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species, the repercussions of man-made disaster lie firmly where they belong: in moral territory.
“Newfoundland seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real,” notes an American doctor when he first encounters the remote settlement of Paradise Deep.
