Can the novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change
The tallest story
Writers are coming to appreciate the theme’s urgency—and its narrative possibilities
The literary novel has a problem with scale. For centuries it has principally focused on the stuff of everyday life. It doesn’t generally concern itself with the cataclysmic or tectonic. Compare Homer’s “Odyssey” with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: whereas the epic incorporates gods, slaughters and the fate of nations, the novel celebrates the intimate and quotidian.
The literary novel has a problem with time. Novels are one of the ways in which a culture thinks about the challenges it faces, but frequently the form looks to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into the future. The Victorian novel pondered the rapidly industrialising economy and shifting class structures of the age. Yet many of the great books of the period, from “Middlemarch” to “A Tale of Two Cities”, employed historical settings. Today’s novelists often turn to the two world wars, or even more remote eras, for their subjects.
Apr 4th 2019
