Imagining Climate Change

The Wall, John Lanchester

One of the many failures of our culture when it comes to possible climate change futures is in playing out the likely consequences of change. "The future" becomes one purely of temperature extremes, rainfall change and, sometimes, agricultural shortages. Numbers that, while meaningful, don't capture the imagination and aren't extrapolated to day-to-day changes in our lives. This makes the future look like somewhere in which we have to, for instance, make do on 10% less food and spend twice as much time indoors sheltering from excessive heat. This overlooks what such changes will actually mean societally, and how they will play out for the daily lives of people in different places on different means.

The Wall is, arguably, an attempt to put human flesh and feeling around one climate future. It's a relatively slim volume, and focused around a small cast, but it makes great strides in sketching out how climate change can reshape a whole society, and what consequences and choices it might impose.

The book opens, almost with sly nod to Game of Thrones, with its central character, Kavanagh, braced against the cold, up on the Wall and looking for Others. The Wall is Britain's response first to sea level rise, but more significantly to the waves of climate refugees displaced from their homes. Kavanagh's job, as a Defender on a two-year stint, is to stop the Others from breaching the Wall and reaching the relative safety within. In this future, it is the young that serve on the Wall, while the old, whose past inactions have caused the Change which drives it, are cowed and nostalgic for lost beaches. And this service comes with double jeopardy for the Defenders - the risk of harm while serving on the Wall, and the penalty of being cast out to sea if any Others break through on their watch. Both of which become more than mere risks for Kavanagh as his tour of duty unspools.

In spite of its relative brevity, this creates an unnerving future Britain. Through the drama it inflicts on its characters, it shows how, while civilization may not necessarily fall under climate change, its best features can easily be worn away. Kavanagh is a relatable Everyman, but even he stops himself thinking too deeply about the Others or why they are so desperate to break into Britain. However, his resentment at previous generations, including his own parents, for their abject failure to avoid the Change is much clearer. This future Britain may not be (completely) materially ruined, but the isolationism fostered by the Change, and the resulting loss of humanity in its citizens, marks its true devastation.

So not the cheeriest read, but recommended.

Stray observations:

• The climate future presented in the novel is an interesting one. The reader is first introduced to how cold it is, counter to ongoing global warming. However, it is later made clear that it’s much warmer elsewhere, which is suggestive of the cold in Britain being a result of changes in ocean circulation. The decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, for instance, is simulated to result in reduced warming in northwestern Europe relative to other locations. I don’t think that (m)any simulations would suggest strong cooling, but there’s something of a basis for the nature of the Change as it appears in the novel.
• A number of reviews have described The Wall as “this century’s 1984” or similar, presumably latching onto the fact that its future dystopia can be read as a warning for the present. And there’s certainly something prophetic in its world, but in terms of style and narrative the two books really don’t overlap. The Wall is far, far less didactic than 1984, and the better for it. The closer parallel is with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with its similarly pared-back text and narrative, although The Wall gets the nod because its particular environmental calamity is more unambiguously related to our own. (The Road still wins out in terms of total doom, however.)
• In another sly nod, The Wall introduces a politician character with more than a passing resemblance to a certain British Prime Minister known for populism and lying. That said, the narrative ultimately gives him a more noble path than one might expect from this affinity, so perhaps I’m overinterpreting.
• Intriguingly from a “future technology” perspective, the Britain presented in The Wall runs off of nuclear power. It’s fleetingly mentioned, and never referred to again, so it’s difficult to know if the author means much by this. Admittedly, the changed local climate in Britain sounds less favourable to renewables like solar, but there could be more to this choice by the author.
• While an underpinning, and largely realised, feature of the world of The Wall is "civilization within, barbarism without", one of my bugbears about the IPCC scenarios that we use in climate change research is that, no matter how bad their futures get, things remain civilised. I think scenario designers might do well to read The Wall and reflect.