The Swan Book

"The Swan Book exists in an incredibly heightened kind of reality, both in terms of the world itself, which is rich and beautiful as well as violent and profoundly disturbed, and the language, which is vivid and raw and repetitive in ways that sometimes seem almost incantatory. The effect is close to what we might usually describe as magical realism, but I think it’s really important to be careful about what we mean by that. Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation, whose country is in the Gulf of Carpentaria in Australia’s north, and although Aboriginal culture and mythology suffuse the book, as Jane Gleeson-White has pointed out they’re not magical, at least not in the the way the magical realism that came out of South America in the 1960s and 1970s was. Instead they’re the reflection and embodiment of a lived and living culture, a way of seeing the world and understanding it, spatially, temporally, historically, socially. This is especially true of the way the novel blurs time and time frames. More than almost any other novel I’ve read The Swan Book gives you a sense of the different ways time inhabits country for Aboriginal people, the way the deep past is not gone, but still living, still present. That sense of connectedness – and the derangement of disconnection – is written deep into the novel. “For Aboriginal people, the way the deep past is not gone, but still living, still present” Yet at the same time the book is an intensely political document that grapples directly with the present day. To an Australian, many elements are immediately recognisable: the refugee camps, the reminders of the Howard Government’s use of the army to intervene in Aboriginal communities and strip their people of basic rights, the hastening environmental crisis. That last seems the obvious way in, not least because in a very real sense Australia is a laboratory for what climate change is going to be like. The south-east of the continent is warming fast, and although fire and flood have always been integral to the Australian environment the fires and floods of recent years have become increasingly destructive, and that process looks like it will accelerate in coming years. But what The Swan Book forces us to see is that this transformation is just the end point of a longer process that began when Europeans arrived here just over two centuries ago, and that it and the dispossession and murder of the Aboriginal peoples are really just two sides of the same coin in the starkest possible terms. I don’t think there’s any question novels have a role. The disturbances and convulsions of climate change increasingly touch every aspect of our lives, disturbing our social relations, bleeding into our psyches by demanding we recognise the cost of our privilege, the way it depends upon the exploitation of the natural world and those less fortunate than us, even unsettling our capacity to believe in the existence of some kind of consensual reality. Doing that requires fiction to take on new shapes and find new ways of addressing and representing not just our lives but reality itself. As I said earlier, I think the growing prevalence of tropes and techniques from science fiction and the other literatures of the fantastic in the literary mainstream is at least partly about the fact they offer ways of talking about the effects of climate change, but I also suspect you can see writers working through this process in other, less obvious ways: certainly it’s not an accident there are so many books that employ discontinuous or mosaic narratives in the way Clade does, or that use the family and its disruption as a metaphor for the effects of climate change, since both offer ways of talking about time and the disruption of our sense of connectedness to past and future. Nor that there are so many novels around at the moment that blur the boundary between the human and the non-human, or that grapple with ideas of time and deep time. “Fiction has an important role to play in helping us imagine alternatives, either explicitly, or simply by reminding us of the contingency of history” Fiction also has an important part to play in resisting the weird amnesia of capitalism, the perpetual Year Zero of a culture which seeks to hide not just its origins, but the violence at its heart. Those processes are at the heart of novels like Barkskins and The Swan Book , both of which grapple with the slow violence of climate change and the fact that violence has a history and a logic, in which all of us are implicated. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And as I said at the beginning, fiction has an incredibly important role to play in helping us imagine alternatives, either explicitly, as Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels often do, or simply by reminding us of the contingency of history. I don’t think it’s an accident that so much fiction about these questions seeks to make sense of the immensity of time: to talk about time is to talk about loss, but placing our human conception of time within a geological context is also a way of reminding ourselves of the impermanence of things. To my mind at least it’s this last that matters the most. The physical, conceptual and ethical immensity of climate change is overwhelming, so it’s unsurprising we tend to retreat into denial or despair. But the reality is that both responses are ultimately self-fulfilling, and if we’re going to move past them we need to learn to think about our situation in new ways and create a space in which we can imagine change. Fiction can make that space."