The Wager and the Bear (Der Eisbär und die Hoffnung auf morgen). [Posted: 27 April 2023]

So I have a new novel launching in Germany next month. The English title is, ‘The Wager and the Bear,’ and the German title (a little less catchy perhaps) is ‘Der Eisbär und die Hoffnung auf morgen,’ which my google translator tells me means, ‘The Polar Bear and the Hope for Tomorrow.’ It might be a while before an English language edition is published – which is a shame. I’ll try to explain that in a moment – but first let me tell you about ‘The Wager and the Bear.’

The original idea for the story came from my brilliant agent, Stan. I told him I wanted to write a climate-change novel, and he sent me an email in February 2021, outlining a scenario he described as a cross between Not Forgetting the Whale and Local Hero. He called it ‘Not Forgetting the Iceberg.’ I rarely (normally) pick up on story-suggestions people give me but this was a rather compelling idea, and I found myself sitting down and writing an experimental first chapter. Then of course I had to write a second, and a third … and this is how novels get written. Stan wanted the story to be set in Scotland. I wanted it back in Cornwall – in my fictional village of St Piran. Stan saw the iceberg as the central threat. I saw the iceberg as a harbinger of a greater threat. And so I set about ignoring all Stan’s advice, and now not much remains of his original story, alas, except for the iceberg. But the iceberg (as you will see if ever you read the novel) does play a very central part. It is a story still very rooted in St Piran, and both the hero, Tom, and the anti-hero, Monty, are St Piran boys. It is an action story, a love story, a story with real, terrifying jeopardy … and a story with a bear.

The challenge with any story about climate change is to accommodate the long timescales. The climate catastrophe is something that might be almost instantaneous in geological terms, but measured against human lifespans it is ponderously snail-like. (See my last blog post https://notablebrain.blogspot.com/2023/04/climate-change-cats-and-spaghetti-essay.html) So unlike ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ (Der Wal und das Ende der Welt) this story unravels over a whole human lifetime. And during this lifetime we will come to discover if Tom really is the hero and Monty the anti-hero. Or is it more nuanced?

I do hope, if you can read German, you will discover this book. If you do, please write to let me know your reactions. You can message me through this blog. If, like me, you are limited to reading in English you might have to wait a little longer. I suspect UK publishers want to wait to see how well it does in Europe – and this is because my last novel, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild’ didn’t sell all that well in Britain. My counter to this is to explain that ‘Heloise’ hit the bookshops in hardback when shops were closed due to Covid, and the paperback launched when bookshops were closed again. It launched with virtually no publicity. There was, I suppose, very little point publicising a book when the shops were all shut. So it goes. It had a beautiful cover – but (in my mind) the title was wrong. My original title was, ‘Katya’s Gift,’ and I can’t shake off the feeling that it would have done better with that title. Heloise is still my favourite novel by the way. And it is still out there if ever you’re looking for something new to read.

Anyway – all that aside, I can’t wait to see ‘The Wager and the Bear’ in print. Here again is that beautiful cover. And thank you once again to the wonderful people at S.Fischer Verlag for having faith in me.  

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Cats, and Spaghetti, and Climate Change [13 April 2023]

 I can’t remember when (or where) I first heard the expression, ‘herding cats.’ I don’t think this idiom was around when I was young. So far as I can tell, it was invented sometime in the 1980s and it took off. Soon everyone was using it. It’s a great little saying because we all know enough about cats to understand right away what it means. ‘I did my best, but it was like herding cats.’ At once we appreciate the futility, the complexity, and the sheer absence of co-operation from everyone concerned. You don’t get herds of cats. They are too bloody-minded.

My father had a saying that meant almost the same thing. But not quite. He would say, ‘it was like trying to organise spaghetti.’ Somehow, for me, organising spaghetti feels like an enterprise even more doomed to failure than herding cats. The cats may not want to be herded, but there is at least the possibility that they might eventually succumb. Spaghetti on the other hand will never submit to organisation. And unlike the cats this isn’t due to wilfulness or contrariness. Disorganisation is a property of the spaghetti itself.

Efforts to resolve the climate-change crisis are often compared to herding cats. In this metaphor the ‘cats’ are the 195 countries on the planet, across 7 continents, where no two countries think alike, or act alike, or have the same priorities, or enjoy similar political systems, or possess the same resources, or have the same levels of understanding. How do we ever herd these slippery belligerent cats into the same box?  Even so, I worry that the problem is more like organising spaghetti. There is no way to do this. We’ll never get everyone on board. Perhaps we ought to accept this and find a different way.

There is, by the way, a rather clever online tool called ‘Google NGram Viewer.’ It can help you to figure out when (but not necessarily where) a word or an expression arose. It searches millions of books over the past two centuries, and if the words you’ve entered appear in 40 books or more in any calendar year, it counts them and plots a graph to show how the frequency has changed with time.  Forty books feels like quite a high bar to me. If you enter ‘herding cats’ you won’t find any use of this expression until 1938. In 1942 the phrase disappears, and it doesn’t reappear until 1987. After that the frequency graph rises meteorically, like the lift-off of a space rocket. It is as if there was something that happened in the Eighties that made this expression useful.

If, by the way, you try ‘organised spaghetti’ in NGram Viewer you don’t get any results at all. Maybe this expression was exclusively my dad’s.

If I look up from my keyboard, and glance out of my window, I can see a storm coming. The clouds gathering over the estuary look as grey and heavy as gunmetal.

And now, in the time it has taken me to type that last sentence, the storm is upon us. The rain is driving against my window. I no longer have a view.  Funny how the weather can do that, and we all accept it. We look at the forecasts and we plan our days around them. Let’s do the beach on Sunday when the rain stops. But if we’re told the whole global climate is changing, we go into a complex form of denial.  We don’t really know how to plan. We hope that tomorrow will be much the same as today, and on the whole it is, and that gives us comfort. It makes us think this is nothing to worry about. Yet.

One metaphor I have heard used about climate change is ‘a slow-motion car crash.’ I used this myself in a novel, ‘The Wager and the Bear.’ The image I wanted was  of an impending catastrophe where the parts are all in motion, where no one is yet hurt, but where terrible death and destruction await if no one acts to stop it. A slow-motion car crash seems to tick all of those boxes. But all the same, I’m not altogether happy with this metaphor. For a start it seems too prosaic. (I’m using the word prosaic to mean lacking in poetry – but also to mean lacking in purpose.) I’ve tried to think of a better image. A train crash is better perhaps, because it involves more people. But slow-motion is insufficient to describe the slow and gradual increments of change that the climate crisis delivers. Sea levels are rising by around four and a half millimetres a year. In ten years, at this rate, they will rise four and a half centimetres. And the sea, as we know, moves up and down, sometimes quite erratically so that doesn’t feel like a threat. Not really. In a century the sea might rise forty five centimetres. About knee high. And none of us likes to think forward more than a century. Do we?

Isn’t that odd? We don’t have this blind spot with history. We’re fascinated by the lives of the Tudors (Henry VIII was on the throne 500 years ago). We love stories about the Romans (2,000 years ago). And yet we don’t speculate much on where our descendants might be in 500 or 2,000 years – what kind of world they will inhabit. Or what (since we chose this measurement) the sea levels might be. So let’s speculate then. Assume that sea levels keep on rising at 4.5mm a year (in reality the rate will almost certainly accelerate but let’s ignore that for a moment.) Our descendants in 2000 years will inherit seas 9 metres higher than today. The map of the world will have been altered irreversibly. Britain will have lost most of East and Central London, and great swathes of the Thames Valley including towns like Dartford, and Kingston. Hundreds of seaside towns will have been wholly lost to the rising waters - places like Portsmouth, Southampton, Middlesborough and Blackpool, Cardiff and Newport, and Gloucester. Lincoln (now 38 miles from the sea) will be a seaside town. So will whatever remains of Cambridge. So will York. So will Taunton.  Across The Channel most of the Netherlands and much of Belgium will be underwater.  So will huge tracts of Northern Germany. America will lose thousands of communities down the Eastern seaboard. China will lose Shanghai and Guangzhou. Bangkok and Kolkata and Ho Chi Minh City will be gone. And Basra, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. 

And here’s the thing. The water will still be rising. It still has a way to go. If all the ice melts (and it probably will if global temperature rises by 4 degrees) then sea levels rise seventy metres or so.

9 metres of sea level rise puts the Netherlands underwater

And sea level changes are, perhaps, the least of our worries. A 4 degree rise would make most of the world between the tropics practically uninhabitable. It would certainly make agriculture almost impossible. It will cause catastrophic drought . And the Northern farmlands which will now be warmer will not take up the slack. Celestial mechanics will still restrict sunlight in winter, and the soils are anyway very unproductive. And anyway a weird side effect of climate change might mean that as the world gets hotter (and sea levels keep rising) Europe curiously will get colder as ocean currents slow down.

Finally there is a terrifying threat. This is how it might be in, 'The Year of the Dugong.' If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm) (and they could) it could push the Earth’s climate over a tipping point. This would see clouds start to break up, and, a cloudless world will reflect away less sunlight. According to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, this could trigger another 8°C rise in global average temperatures. Game Over. 

So slow-motion train crash doesn’t work, does it? ‘Ultra-slow motion asteroid-collision,’ might be better. A disaster movie that runs at one frame a year. But the disaster is still going to happen. And it is inevitable unless we can herd the unruly cats who govern us and get them to start organising the spaghetti. Now.

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com