Review by mhersonhord - The Deluge

mhersonhord 's review for:

The Deluge by Stephen Markley

5.0

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This is the most important book I have read in a very long time. I haven’t read a book this fat this quickly since the last Harry Potter came out, and I devoured it like a starving man. But it’s probably truer to say instead that it ate me: violently, lovingly, completely.

It is kind of extraordinary to me that something like this could emerge from the head of a single person. As literary craft, the effortlessness of its characterizations would be masterful in any genre on any subject. As scientific speculation, it wields a command of a complex array of specialist fields requiring years of study to approximate. As political tract, I have too much to say to discuss here, but it lays out painful truths for the whole political spectrum to face, from the revolutionary adventurist to the most committed reformer to the dead-eyed reactionary, while being an exploration of the Malcolm and Martin dynamic with remarkable depth. As history of the future, it achieves an extraordinarily sophisticated realism that I have not seen matched anywhere else, alongside which today’s acclaimed “futurists” look like sophomoric jokes.

What it captures most vividly of all is this simple, mathematical truth: that we speak of our climate fate in terms of degrees for a reason. Every increment—of wasted carbon, of wasted weeks—means everything, for another batch of some millions of people. Each incremental decline into atmospheric chaos hurls more of us into the chipper. Our fate, then, is not a binary morality tale of success/failure, good-guys-win/bad-guys-win, sad-ending/happily-ever-after. It is never too early, nor, we must hope, too late to stop this train, because every fraction of a degree matters. No matter what, we are now inescapably in for centuries of human pain and suffering and many millennia of ecological impoverishment, yet the variance of brutal futures ahead of us could not range more widely. In the best case scenario, we rapidly launch global decarbonization before the close of the 2020s, still dooming millions to death and displacement but nevertheless an incredible victory in basic moral terms in staving off the systemic collapses that loom beyond 1.5 degrees. In the much more likely middle-path (depicted in The Deluge), our societies require destabilization by climate shocks themselves in order to undertake the kind of transformations to contain the climate crisis, and the human cost is gargantuan. No specific global accounting is provided but through the firestorm of calamities visited upon city after city, continent after continent, the mosaic of suffering that emerges is something like low hundreds of millions dead and low billions displaced. But even this apocalyptic cascade is, in the context of the story and of our own most probable and very non-fictional future, a victory above the darkest horrors that lie in wait should we fail in that future period of the ~2040s: a tremendous contraction of the human population through billions of deaths, or (more speculatively but not impossibly) the extinction of our species, or (yet more speculatively, but also not impossibly) an end-Permian type event, in which the vast majority of species of multicellular life become extinct.

The most obvious comparison to be made is with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a book I quite enjoyed. But everything I saw as naïve failure in Ministry for the Future is brutally accounted for in The Deluge. Ministry for the Future was, for me, a depressing book to finish because the events it describes are almost impossibly good, where those seeking to transform global society are audacious technocrats and revolutionary insurgents alike who seemingly face real resistance only in the ecological forces of climate disruption itself. The “system” is portrayed in Robinson’s version of the future as a sort of hapless bystander caught between inertia and the imperative to change. It does not ruthlessly crush its opponents; indeed, it seems to scarcely fight back to defend itself at all. And even when things go better for the climate cause than any clear-headed person could possibly argue could actually happen, the results for humanity and our non-human kin are still simply horrific. The Deluge is much more hard-headed and sober in that regard. I will keep this spoiler free, so suffice it to say that the system fights back. The plot takes its direction not from “what would be most interesting to play out?” but from “where, actually, are we headed on our current course?”.

I did not give this 5 stars because it is a perfect book. It is not. At first arrestingly powerful, the endings of (many) chapters with a crashing crescendo of poetic prose began to feel a tad repetitive. The portrayal of autism was borderline cruel in its hyperbole. It slowly became clear which worldviews the author has the least patience for, and thereby a diminished interest in understanding and portraying convincingly (e.g. evangelical Christianity, identity politics). Even as a card-carrying hater of Xi Jinping Thought, I found the thuggish portrayal of Chinese politics through little snapshots to be crude and frankly unrealistic. I’m highly skeptical of the centrality of virtual reality and AI in the coming decades that Markley depicts. And still none of these flickers of irritation matter. In the words of one of the book’s central characters in the thick of insurrection, “Do we not have bigger fucking fish to fry here?”

My five stars represents, above all, the need I have for others to read it. And to do so immediately. While on an individual level, there are certain depressive personality types I would hesitate to recommend it to, I nevertheless would consider them acceptable psychological casualties of stating with my full chest to all literate adults the bigger and more general truth that you must read this book. And then you need to get it into the hands of your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors.

I cried twice while reading it. The first time was during the closing of the Los Angeles chapter and fairly predictable (not the material but my reaction to it), the sort of overflow of heart-wrenching sentimentality when tragedy and inspiration dance together that I’ve come to expect from myself in certain kinds of movie endings. Powerful, yes, but I didn’t learn anything further about myself for having teared up. The second I could not have been more surprised by, taking me out like a successful solitary ambush predator. That particular mountain cat with its jaws on my spine was the agony of the conscious parent.

The debates about the ethics of having children in an age of reaction and climate catastrophe cropped up periodically within these pages, each time largely washing over me with little personal effect. My daughter was born nine days before Trump was sworn in a second time — an outcome I thought plausible, even likely, when we made the decision to create her. I know the respective arguments inside and out and made my choice accordingly. These discussions of parenthood in the twenty-first century that weave in and out of the book perhaps lulled me into a false sense of security then (as they were nothing I couldn’t breeze by), or maybe they were just setting the table where my tormented psyche was the meal. After stalking me through eight hundred and sixty pages, this mountain lion found its ambush in a hurricane rescue, leaping out at me through the words of someone’s tone-deaf, clueless, kinda shitty right-wing dad. I can’t say if you’ll get pounced on at that spot like I did, but you’ll probably be able to tell where it got me. My blood is still all over the trail. The response it set off in me did not happen in my mind. It was absolutely without warning, instantaneous. I sobbed in a way that hurt, pummeling through my gut, my conscious self a blank and barely comprehending spectator. The mountain lion ransacked its way through my body, ripping out benign tumors of pain and fear from deep in my abdomen and leaving me ragged. It set loose things bottled up so deep that I didn’t even know they were there. It genuinely felt more physiological than emotional, more akin to a ruthless deep-tissue massage or getting knifed in the chest than getting sad and crying about it. I am so grateful that I was alone when reading this final chapter. I am also grateful that I, for whatever thoughtless reason, waited until now to read it, despite having been urged to for some time. Some things just land differently after the birth of one’s first child.

On the whole, I don’t think any work of fiction I’ve ever read has destroyed me and healed me like this. Stop what you’re doing. Go read this fucking book. And hit me up to talk about it when you do.

Content Warnings