OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE
SCENES OF A FAMILY AND A PLANET IN CRISIS
SVANTE AND GRETA THUNBERG, MALENA AND BEATA ERNMAN,
Allen Lane, 288pp, £16.99
Greta Thunberg is named as one of four authors of this book, together with her mother and father and younger sister, but it is her mother’s voice which dominates. Most of the 108 scenes into which the book is divided predate the school strikes which have made Greta Thunberg into a Joan of Arc for our times. They describe Greta’s descent into breakdown aged 11 – she refused to eat and stopped talking to strangers – and how she recovered when she discovered an urgent mission to make the world ‘listen to the science’ on climate change. Along the way we learn of Greta’s mother’s childhood eating disorder, and how she was saved by music and became a starry opera singer, and of the special needs of Greta’s dancing sister. The book doesn’t ask, but readers might, whether some of the strength of Greta Thunberg’s protest was honed
in a struggle for airtime at home.
Rosamund Urwin in the Times pre-empted critics who might want to accuse Greta of ‘Meghan Markle and a private-jet style hypocrisy’ by pointing out that profits from the book are going to environmental charities. David Mitchell in the
Guardian made much of the fact that Greta Thunberg has been diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. He described her as ‘a default autism advocate as well as a climate activist’ and endorsed her own description of her Asperger’s as a ‘superpower’. Jane Shilling in the
Evening Standard was less moved, describing the book as an ‘uneasy account of painful family dynamics, awkwardly (and, it is hard not to feel, somewhat expediently) hitched to ... environmental issues’.