barbara kingsolver book about butterflies

Lodged in the experience of contemporary rural America, it has barely a speculative conceit in its narrative, and climate change initially intrudes with the gentlest beat of a butterfly’s wings.

However, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is to my surprise, the finest climate change book I have read so far despite, or perhaps because it is absolutely rooted in the realities of the here and now. This is the catch-22 that Amitav Ghosh identified in The Great Derangement – the fact that serious literary fiction is constrained to depict the ordinary and everyday experiences, and the greater the scale of deviation from normal a story depicts, the less seriously it is regarded as literature. Some are categorised as science fiction, others as magical realism and that conceptual and temporal distance from our everyday experience makes it difficult for them to gain traction as addressing a very real contemporary issue. The further the books project into the future the more speculative they become. James Bradley’s Clade is a merging of these last two groups in tracing the outturn of the anthropocene era – including climate change – over the seven decade or so course of a single human’s lifetime. Other authors make a more intermediate launch into the future, such that our contemporary times still lie within the reach of human memory and the ultimate impacts of climate change are still evolving and uncertain – for example Rym Kechacha’s Dark River, John Lanchester’s The Wall or Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.

Megan Hunter’s The End We Begin With, Helen Marshall’s The Migration and Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries all take a near contemporary setting to imagine the experience of climate change consequences and responses in the here and now. Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water and Will Self’s The Book of Dave swept forward centuries into the future to explore a society haunted by the done and dusted conclusion of climate change. So the Hive has kindly given me space to post reviews of climate fiction books as well as blogging thoughts and articles on other aspects of my PhD experience.Īuthors have found different ways to engage with climate change and while the setting is always earthbound, the timescales have varied hugely, from near present, through the medium term and into the far future. I’ve now started on a PhD project at the same university with the catchy title “ Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction.” Having taken a career break from secondary schooling to pursue some post graduate study I’ve completed an MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. This is an occasional series of posts drawing on my excursion into the academic side of creative writing.

Barbara kingsolver book about butterflies