I want to be charitable to Stephen Markley's extrapolation of the American future, circa 2023. When he sent this honking great slab of eco-fiction to the galleys, Trump and Covid were in the rear-view mirror, generative AI was just a concept, and the Metaverse was the next big thing. So it makes sense that in Markley's attempt at the Great American Climate Change Novel, we get, post-Biden, an establishment woman Democratic pres followed, in 2028 as things are hotting up, by a black socially conservative Republican, also a woman, who's keen on decarbonisation. American democracy proves robust — even when the shit really hits the fan in the late 2030's, we still have presidential debates, swing states and an electoral college. Markley's very aware of the fault-lines in American society, the frailty of democracy, and the poisonous influence of corporate cash, but reading this book in 2025, his doomsday timeline feels comically optimistic. But that's forgivable — anyone setting their book in the immediate future is going to get custard pied by events one way or another. What's harder to overlook is a kind of naive, cozy belief in liberal institutions that seems to permeate Markley's vision. The New York Times and, even funnier, NPR continue to define the discourse for years to come — in 2028, a couple of the characters celebrate getting Big Carbon ads pulled from the Colbert show and the NYT, as if YouTube and Facebook didn't exist. Which in fact they don't — all social media now takes place on a VR platform idiotically named "Slapdish", in "worldes" (personal spaces) and "xperes" (interactive stuff). This is the future Zuckerberg wanted, back in lockdown days when I was gallumphing round my living room playing VR ping pong with my pal Baulty.

The narrative is split between eight or nine characters, most of them educated and more or less privileged, with a supporting cast of thousands of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representations of American Diversity. Markley proudly shows off his writing chops with a mix of first, second, and third-person narration and some gimmicky offset boxed chunks of text that don't say anything that couldn't have been said less flashily. Among the principal cast, there's the authorial stand-in character, a chickenhearted writer dude who's too bland to be more than mildly annoying, there's an autistic Arab-American savant whose climate emergency status reports to politicos are Markley's way of politely dumping info, a single-mom eco-terrorist of Hispanic descent, a celebrity climate scientist who tells it like it is, an advertising flack who greenwashes for Big Carbon before getting into hedge funds, a bunch of activists who banter and bicker and bang one another, and their leader, a mercurial/insufferable chick of Jamaican-Navajo-Swedish descent who gives the lie to the notion that a flawed character is an interesting one. There's also a token poor person (with an opioid problem, obviously) whose sections are our only respite from the activist-political class. I've skipped a few, but there's a curious flatness to the lot of them, like they've been steamrollered by the weight of the theme; cut from climate-calamity cookie dough.

Is it too long? Yes, yes of course it bloody is. They could have reduced it by about a sixth just by taking a red pen to all Markley's ostentatious displays of wonkery. We spend hours in smoke-filled (metaphorically) rooms haggling over climate legislation, hours more at activist meetings where the nature of the solution and the ethics of direct action are thrashed out. At times the book feels like a white paper masquerading as fiction. As late as page 866 we get hit with 300 words about something called the Climate Mitigation Authority ("CMA") and the Climate Authority Auditor-General, "a watchdog supervisory board tasked with delivering annual reports on the CMA's activities and the ability to shut them down if they are deemed illegal under its mandate [...] the CMA was created as an eleven-member panel, each member serving a five-year term". This is the future Stephen Markley wants: you can't finish a novel without reading and understanding several pieces of legislation. Hack out all this crap, and a few superfluous subplots like Jack's fling with the Pastor, and you'd have a more manageable book, but I suspect the high page-count here is actually a selling point — it's big so it must be clever, the prospective purchaser is supposed to think.

The thing is, The Deluge is actually quite clever. The reams of public policy, while dull, plot a plausible hail-Mary to get us out of our fix. The book's arc of inexorably escalating climate and weather-related devastation plays out frighteningly, and whether it's an L.A. firestorm, a Midwest haboob, or a monster hurricane in the Carolinas, Markley's disaster coverage is great, immediate and palpable in a way his characters aren't. He knows how to craft a sentence, too, though his best writing comes at quiet or pastoral moments, usually when drippy writer guy and obnoxious activist gal are off hiking and fucking al fresco somewhere. Most of the prose is dry and functional. Ultimately though, it's a political novel, boring in parts, already outdated in parts, but with its heart very much in the right place. Maybe the Great American Climate Change Novel will only be possible after the climate emergency is over. Although who knows if there'll still be an America, or novels, by then.

The Deluge

Loading Description

Tags

Bookshelves

Threads

Quotes

Reviews

Delugions of grandeur

Lists