Showing posts with label The Wager and the Bear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Wager and the Bear. Show all posts

The Wager and the Bear [Posted 29th Feb 2024]

 


It's leap-year day so I have an announcement. My climate-crisis novel, 'The Wager and the Bear,' is to be published by Fly on the Wall Books, a northern based publisher-with-a-conscience who specialise in books that might raise awareness of political or climate issues. I love this publisher very much and I can't think of a better home for 'The Wager and the Bear.'   Do please follow me on social media for announcements closer to publication date, or check out my website https://www.johnironmonger.com/  and I'll let you know when it is ready to pre-order.

It isn't a heavy polemical novel. It's simply a good old adventure yarn and a romance but it is quite clearly set against the backdrop of a slow, unfolding global crisis. Oh ... and there is a bear ...  


One Step away from the Precipice: Climate Change in Fiction [Posted 20 Nov 2023]

 This was my article yesterday in La Repubblica - Italy's biggest newspaper. The title translates as 'One Step from the Cliff' - and it is an artcle about climate change in fiction, and about my novel 'The Wager and the Bear' (Soon to be published in English I hope). 


Here is the translation of the text:

David Bowie had a remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom, sitting in a tin-can, drifting forever into space.  But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells a very simple story. News has reached us that the earth has only five years left. The planet is dying. In the song, the newsreader weeps. All around the market square people lose their minds.

What would it be like, I have often wondered, if we really were told this news? If a solemn news report, backed by all the world’s serious scientists, was to tell us we were running out of time? How would we react?

Well we now know the answer to this question. Newsreaders wouldn’t weep. No one would go crazy. We would ignore the danger and carry on with our lives as if nothing had changed. We know this because this is what we do. Every few months the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces a new report telling us the planet is running out of time. Every year the COP climate change conference makes dire predictions. Every year we learn that the previous year was the hottest on record. We watch forest fires in Canada and Brazil. We see dramatic floods, powerful storms, devastating droughts. We watch the collapse of animal populations. World leaders fly in and out of conferences. They make vague promises. But very little changes. And the world continues to die.   

The challenge seems to be a failure of human imagination. Perhaps it is the timescale. If the world was doomed in just five years, we might be more alarmed. If it was an asteroid hurtling towards us, we might make a real global effort to find a solution. But climate change seems to be a long unfolding tragedy. We are like passengers in a slow-motion train crash. The train is heading for a precipice, and all the pieces are in place for a terrible disaster, but everything is moving so slowly we stop worrying.  

All this presents a particular problem for story tellers. Climate change is the biggest story of our time, yet very few novelists are ready to grapple with this. Ten centuries from now, if humanity is still around, I suspect historians will only be interested in one story from our generation - how we responded (or failed to respond) to this existential threat to the planet. Science fiction, in general, has done us rather a disservice here. Writers have sold us either Mad Max-style desert dystopias, or impossible tales of starships taking survivors to new green planets. What we don’t have are real world stories that could help us to imagine the kind of earth we are creating.  And that is a shame, because imagination is what we need, now more than ever.

Once again, timescales seem to be the challenge. Novelists need a central protagonist with whom readers can identify. This character needs to have a story arc, and human dramas are typically too short for climate change to feature very much. There is a second problem too.  It is hard to imagine any character playing anything but a very minor role in what is a huge global drama. No one is going to step forward like Bruce Willis and save the world. For a writer, that is an unhelpful backdrop. We do not like to set up a jeopardy for our characters, without giving them some way to fight back. But how do you fight back against a warming planet?

In ‘L’Orso Polare e una Scomessa Chiamata Futuro’ (The Wager and the Bear) I hope I may have found a way to navigate a little around these two problems. The narrative unfolds over a whole human lifetime, and the central characters are front-seat observers of the climate disaster. The story involves two young men. One, Monty, is a politician. He is a climate change-denier. He lives in a grand house on the beach in Cornwall. He has a splendid lifestyle, and like so many of us in the slow-motion train crash, he doesn’t see the precipice approaching. The second man, Tom, is a climate scientist and campaigner. One drunken night, over too many glasses of cider in the local inn, the two men get into a quarrel. It ends with a deadly wager. In fifty years, either the sea will rise enough to drown Monty in his home, or Tom will accept the jeopardy himself, and will walk into the sea and drown. A video of the wager, posted online, goes viral. How will it all work out?

Well we have fifty years for the story to unfold. The lives of the two men cross several times, leading them both onto a melting glacier, and ultimately onto an iceberg floating down the coast of Greenland where their only companion is a hungry bear.  

The story is not entirely without hope. It is set against the backdrop of a campaign to restore some of what the world has lost. Neither Monty nor Tom can save the world. But there is at least hope, as well as despair.  

Climate change doesn’t have to be front and centre in contemporary fiction. But we shouldn’t be ignoring it either. As writers we have a responsibility, sometimes, to make the future seem real. We are hurtling towards a world of human-made disasters, of dying oceans, of rising seas, of failing harvests, of droughts, of economic collapse, and of climate-driven conflicts. We cannot ignore these things. If these aren’t part of our fictional landscape now, then they need to be.  Otherwise one day we may find we have just five years left. And it won’t just be the news readers weeping. 


Check out my website: 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 



The Greenland Ice Sheet (Point 660: My Map Pins 38) and ‘The Wager and the Bear.’ May 2022

Point 660
They call this place Point 660. I never figured out why. Our guide Daniel Jonssen (thanks Daniel) didn’t know, and he knew everything. It’s probably a map reference. Or something. Anyway, this is a quick blog about our (carbon neutral) visit there last week  (me and Jon), and it's a shameless plug for a new novel. More about that in a moment. 

It’s a five hour round trip from Kangerlussuaq to Point 660 (if you go via the Russell Glacier and you really should). You’ll need a good 4x4 and a guide who frankly isn’t bothered if he bends the vehicle in half. That’s because the route is rough. You will see reindeer, musk ox, and even arctic hares. If you're lucky (we were) you'll see chunks of ice calving from the glacier. Some intrepid adventurers trek this journey on foot and camp overnight, and I rather envy them. Maybe next time. 
The Russell Glacier

If you look at the map of Greenland you’ll spot a swathe of green down the west coast, and roughly where this landscape is at its widest, you’ll find the village of Kangerlussuaq (population 450) (pronounce it kang ul schwua). Remarkably there is a road to nowhere that leads east from here for 26 kilometres. The road was apparently built by Volkswagen to test cars on the ice. It is the longest road in Greenland (unsurfaced of course) and it winds steadily upwards along the desolate glacial valley alongside the Sandflugtsdal meltwater river, through sandy desert, hills, and utterly breath-taking landscapes, past frozen lakes and glaciers, and then it ends abruptly when it meets the Greenland Ice Cap. This is Point 660. You won’t have passed a living soul for almost two hours. You leave the ‘comfort’ of the 4x4 and you trek on foot over a rocky moraine – like the spill from a gravel quarry – and after a while, you find yourself on the ice sheet. And here you draw a very deep breath. 

The Greenland ice sheet is one of the great natural wonders of our planet. It is colossal. From Point 660 you’d need to walk 600 km in a straight line over ice to reach the west coast. The walk to the northernmost point would be 1,000 km, and it’s 800 km south until you run out of ice. That is a seriously big lump of ice. And it’s deep. Really deep. Most of it goes down more than 2 km. That’s well over a mile for English readers. And while we might idly imagine that Greenland could lose a little ice and still have plenty to spare, it might be helpful to consider the impact this immense block of ice has on the globe. A lucky accident of geography has plonked it right at the top of the Atlantic, where it acts as a global air conditioner, keeping the world from heating up too much by cooling down winds and reflecting away a lot of sunlight. It also holds a heck of a lot of freshwater. If (or maybe when) it all melts it would raise sea levels all around the world by 7 metres. 

My new novel for 2023, 'The Wager and the Bear,' features the Greenland ice sheet.  (The title may be subject to change of course.) The story unfolds in the fictional village of St Piran in Cornwall, and it begins with a very public altercation between two villagers – one a climate activist and the other an ambitious politician. The argument concludes with a dangerous wager that only one man should be able to survive. Events spiral out of control and somehow both men find themselves alone on the Greenland ice sheet, and then adrift on a giant iceberg, floating down Baffin Bay. It does make sense I promise. It is a novel about climate change, but it is also about enduring love, friendship, and community. Watch this space – or follow #thewagerandthebear on Instagram or Twitter and I’ll let you know when it is available for pre-order. 

So back to Point 660. It is an awesome destination. Desolate and beautiful. It made me feel quite emotional to walk out and stand on the ice. I hope it stays, pristine and forever frozen. I fear that it won’t. The what3words link below takes you there.

https://w3w.co/superhero.spelled.crooned


The Wager and the Bear [Posted 29th Feb 2024]

  It's leap-year day so I have an announcement. My climate-crisis novel, 'The Wager and the Bear,' is to be published by Fly on ...