Having tackled opioids in 'Ohio,' Stephen Markley swings for the fences on climate disaster in his follow-up — which might have made better nonfiction.
dares to imagine, painstakingly, how we might get from here to there, filling a giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact. Characters disappear for as many as a hundred pages and reemerge a year later, necessitating repeated exposition dumps. As a result, the reader doesn’t feel intimately close to most of the characters.
The central figure, Kate Morris, is observed exclusively through the eyes of others, never narrating her own experience. She’s a study character, likechanges in the conventional sense. If anything, they dig deeper into themselves. Tony Pietrus, the climate scientist, is as stubbornly steadfast and gruff by the end as he is when we first met him.
When climate change is the subject of fiction, it becomes easy to interpret as advocacy, as a political novel of ideas rather than a tale driven by characters. Markley does little to dispel this impression. When there is yet another extreme weather event in “The Deluge” and many people lose their homes, communities and lives, it’s hard not to feel a bit bludgeoned by it all.
Markley does throw some satire into America’s next few decades, mostly in the form of VR environments called “worldes” that are like the’s wet dream, but he remains decidedly earnest about his vision of the future and his plea to our present. “One day,” Morris says in a flashback, “an awful lot of people are going to wake up, look around, and wish they’d done something when they had the chance.” Pietrus’ book is titled “One Last Chance.
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