Survival mode
Jessie Greengrass joins the cli-fi trend with a powerful apocalyptic tale of flood and family, writes Gwendolyn Smith
Early in The High House, a climate scientist scorns the work of a young artist. Against a backdrop of global catastrophe, she deems it “too comfortable,” as though “there was nothing important to be thought about.” She surely couldn’t say the same of this novel.
Jessie Greengrass’s affecting but uneven second book – which follows her acclaimed debut, Sight – swells the fast-growing genre of climate fiction, or cli-fi, painting an eerie portrait of a flooded, near-future Britain through the eyes of a trio of survivors: two women, Caro and Sally, and Pauly, Caro’s stepbrother.
The setting is an unspecified English village, where the three live in a former holiday home. They have no contact with the outside world, or whatever is left of it: the rising waters have obliterated most of the country and its population. The novel moves back and forward in time as they each narrate how they ended up there.
From Caro, we learn that her father, an academic, and stepmother Francesca, a famous scientist (the one who criticised the artist) were killed in a storm some years previously when working in the US. Just before it hit, they instructed Caro to flee with toddler Pauly to the high house. Elevated from the land surrounding it, and boasting an orchard, tide pool and barn stocked with medical supplies, Francesca had transformed it into a veritable ark. Caro and Pauly have lived off the land there ever since, cohabiting with its caretakers, Sally and her grandfather.
Packed with nature imagery – baby Pauly is described as “unfurling like new green leaves” – the novel artfully transmits that this is a world where the physical landscape prevails. Greengrass is unnerving in her portrait of the gradual, inevitable slide towards disaster, and how people couldn’t process what was happening. Caro remembers the experience as “like those dreams in which one struggles to wake but can’t.”
While charting a large-scale natural disaster, this is ultimately a tale of domestic life, from teenage Caro’s delight in caring for her brother – “He took my hand, and worry burned off like mist” – to the claustrophobic interdependence of life at the high house.
There are some beautiful lines about grief, such as Caro admitting that thinking of her late father “was unbearable. I could feel the shape of the empty space his hands had left behind”.
But the book is let down by its structure: two opening sections in which Caro and Sally recall their separate childhoods make for a slow, disjointed start. The writing is also patchy, hypnotic prose weighed