Impressive portrayal of a chilling near future
A tense and gripping eco-thriller asks the big questions through an ugly and credible tale, writes Sue Green.
This second novel from the critically acclaimed author of The Bees hits the shelves as climate change’s dangerous impact on Arctic ice has caused the cancellation of a Canadian climate change study. As president Donald Trump pulls the US out of the Paris climate treaty, The Ice is set in a future in which the sea ice in the resourcerich Arctic has melted and government and business power plays threaten its remaining wildlife. It’s not so much science fiction as prophecy.
The Bees, in which one worker bee was at odds with her colony, had a strong environmental message. Here, the message threatens to overwhelm the narrative, but Paull manages to pull it back in this tense and chilling – literally and figuratively – portrayal of an ugly and credible near future.
Paull skilfully moves her eco-thriller narrative back and forth in time. It opens with a body, shot out of a calving Arctic glacier in front of cruise ship passengers hungry for sightings of the last polar bears.
It’s environmentalist Tom Harding, who died three years earlier when an ice cave collapsed. Sean Cawson, his business partner and best friend of 30 years, survived.
It moves between the ‘‘present’’, with the recovery of Harding’s body, and the past, in which the pair of Arctic explorers come together in Cawson’s Arctic business which is not all that it seems. Their friendship had been tested to breaking point by the incompatibility of Cawson’s pragmatism – accepting climate change as a given and negotiating the best possible outcome with business – and Harding’s hardline conviction that it is not too late to halt the ravages.
Cancelling their study because of unexpected southward-moving ice, the Canadian scientists called for greater realisation that the climate change’s impacts are happening now. Paull, well aware of this, has trouble resisting didacticism. Joe Kingsmith, Cawson’s sinister backer and mentor, tells Harding: ‘‘The ice is going going gone… there is no political will… Much easier to make all you bleeding hearts feel guilty for flying on vacation than change a trade deal.’’
Paull’s research is impressive – for further reading there is a bibliography – and The Ice is a timely wake-up call. It asks: can environmental and business ethics really be reconciled, or is Sean Cawson and those sharing this belief naive? But it’s also a gritty and involving story of friendship and betrayal, political machinations and a tense buildup to a gripping conclusion. Some questions are answered, not least, was Harding’s death really an accident? But the bigger worry about the impact of climate change remain.