Life during warm time
Two novelists imagine how NZ might cope in a future affected by climate change.
The tide of industrial society has ebbed all the way in the Aotearoa New Zealand of Lawrence Patchett’s The Burning River. Almost all that’s left behind are the plastic containers that craftsman Van retrieves from a noxious swamp, repairing and supplying them to locals as well as the occasional desperate passerby looking for healthier land to the south. Trading of any kind is a deadly serious exercise, and safe passage from one area to another is bought at great cost – as is the visit Van unexpectedly receives from a high-born messenger of the prosperous Whaea people, who live securely behind wooden palisades – at least for the time being.
The journey that follows is dangerous and unsparing, but it’s also built around reciprocity, negotiation and the importance of coming to terms with the past. In short, it’s a deeply bicultural effort, featuring a casual blend of te reo and English dialogue (avowedly a Pākehā author, Patchett acknowledges a brace of Māori experts consulted throughout the writing process) and following a narrative arc that reflects both colonial dispossession and contemporary efforts to reckon with it and find an honest path forward.
At the same time, The Burning River is a tense and convincing work of imagination. The factions involved are sharply drawn, some being known (if distasteful) quantities and others representing a pure existential threat. Violence is never far away, but its appearances are brief, jarring and without a shred of glamour; the major setpieces Patchett builds his story around are contests of words rather than weap
The Burning River is less a balm than a challenge waiting to be taken up – another reason this striking novel deserves a wide audience.
ons, and require no less skill or courage from their participants in a world where the stakes of persuasion can be total.
A passing mention of storms driving northern raiders southward is as specific as Patchett gets concerning the fate of the world as we knew it.
In outline, it’s the precise situation we’re in as a country 250 years after Cook; and
if there’s also a quiet note of optimism in The Burning River, it’s less a balm than a challenge waiting to be taken up – one more reason this striking, thoughtful novel deserves a wide audience.
In a nearer, more crowded future, Vai Shuster, advocate for the tiny island of Independence, has ample opportunity to echo Greta Thunberg’s “how dare you” in Jeff Murray’s imagined New Zealand of 2048. The world has failed to avert destructive climate change, and Pacific nations are being steadily pummeled out of existence by sea-level rise and extreme weather. New Zealand plans to put the refugees in depopulated regions: a scorched
Hawke’s Bay, for instance, or flood-prone parts of Southland.
It’s slim pickings by the time Vai arrives to seek sanctuary for her people. Her response is to push for faster action any way she can, drawing her into activist, business and political currents that carry her steadily south, towards the retreating frontier of Antarctica.
Murray’s urban planning background informs the difficult choices that drive the plot forward, and he writes what he knows in presenting an uncomfortably believable vision of Auckland at mid-century: overcast, overheated and fraying at the edges, from crowded apartments in
Ōtāhuhu to clutches of tents in Cornwall Park. The overall mood is a kind of
climate noir:
moral ambiguity, hidden motivations and moments of fateful choice. Some of the subtlety wears off mid-novel as Melt’s geopolitical scope broadens, with dialogue and exposition forced to carry the novel’s big ideas. Eventually, however, something confronting and personal breaks cover – and if it doesn’t quite redeem the preceding unevenness, it’s at least on-message in a novel that never promises a future to be comfortable with. THE BURNING RIVER, by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, $30); MELT, by Jeff
Murray (Mary Egan Publishing, $35)