Flight Behaviour

"Because it’s top-flight storytelling, written by a seasoned pro. It wasn’t published six years ago as a ‘cli-fi’ novel, and Kingsolver herself never called it that. The novel isn’t about global warming per se. It’s a fable, a poetic fable, with a strong cast of memorable characters. Whether you’re a woman or a man, the novel will resonate with you. The vision of the monarch butterflies at the beginning of the story is almost mystical, religious, spiritual. It’s pure storytelling with no false moves. What makes her book work for me was that it didn’t fall into the trap of being preachy. As a non-scientist, I loved the book and read it with the same page-turning excitement as I felt when I used to read novels when I was a teenager in the 1960s, when literature was still fresh and new to me. The chapters in Flight Behaviour about the climate denialists in the local community are powerful and get to the heart of the matter. This isn’t a novel using government statistics and scientific studies to preach to the choir: it goes for the reader’s EQ rather than her or his IQ. I liked that. All cli-fi books should be like this. I couldn’t stop reading, over a period of several days, as I entered Kingsolver’s world here in my apartment in Taiwan . She is pure genius. Kingsolver has lived in Africa – which was the setting for her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible – and she wrote Flight Behaviour while living in rural Virginia, so she knows a thing or two about the rich and the poor, and the haves and the have-nots. In this novel she explores class in rural America, and it’s not always a pretty picture. To answer your question, I might answer with a slight modification to novelist William Gibson’s often-quoted quip that ”the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” to the effect that “climate activism is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” So yes, the novel explores class in America, and class differences in the environmental movement. Kingsolver shines a light on this, and it’s illuminating."

"One of the things that’s fascinating about Flight Behaviour is that at at least on the surface it offers a counter-example Ghosh’s argument social realism is not fit for purpose when it comes to climate change. After all, here is a novel that is absolutely depicting the social realities of a small community through a fine-grained attention to the detail of individual lives. The only remarkable thing is the arrival of a flock of butterflies whose migration has been disrupted by climate change, and even that might well have been plucked from the pages of a newspaper. And in an odd way it’s precisely this attention to social reality that makes the novel so effective, and so interesting. Because what Kingsolver lets us see is the way small disruptions to natural cycles alter the world, often without us even being fully aware of it, gradually deranging and unsettling individuals and communities. “ Kingsolver lets us see the way small disruptions to natural cycles alter the world, gradually deranging and unsettling individuals and communities” I don’t think there’s any question writing like this is vital. Delia Falconer recently wrote eloquently about the “urgent need for fiction that can register the tiny cultural shifts that are enabling the disaster that is unfolding everywhere around us,” and while I suspect I’m less optimistic about the larger question of whether the social realist novel can genuinely accommodate the sorts of psychic and environmental climate change causes I share her desire for books that engage with these questions directly as well as metaphorically or through the medium of the fantastic. Likewise it allows the novel to ask a series of fairly pointed questions about the framing of the problem of climate change, and the assumptions underlying much of our discussion of it by introducing a strong class element. The butterflies appear not in some elegant upstate New York university town or a comfortable Californian community, but in the Appalachians, and to people with extremely limited education and material wealth. For many of the researchers who come to study the butterflies this is unknown territory, and so they blunder condescendingly about, oblivious to their ridiculousness (the fact the main researcher, Ovid Byron, is African-American sets up another conflict). It’s a process that culminates in a truly excruciating scene in which a climate change activist lectures the central character, Dellarobia, about things she can do to reduce her carbon footprint, suggesting she buy fewer clothes, replace her appliances less often and fly less, failing to realise the character already wears second hand clothes, has never flown and finds the notion of replacing appliances before they have died a natural death unthinkable simply because it’s economically impossible. Alongside this critique is a no less interesting exploration of the interplay between love and beauty and grace and an attempt to understand the motivations of those in America’s Bible Belt for whom climate change is at best an abstraction, and at worst a communist plot. Kingsolver tries to reveal the ways in which these two awarenesses of the world – religious and scientific – are perhaps not as far apart as they seem to be. “What was the use of saving a world that has no soul left in it?” wonders Ovid at one point. Yet in a way one of the things that’s most compelling about Flight Behaviour is that something happens in the final pages that shifts it out and away from the careful realism of the earlier sections. At one level it’s another miracle, book-ending the miracle of the butterflies’ arrival at the book’s beginning, but it’s also a literal expression of the way everything we think of as permanent, even narrative, is destabilised and swept away by climate change."