IN THE EYE OF THE WIND
Author's new novel is a sizzling ecological thriller set in Newfoundland
Too often, Prospero is an old, bearded man with a teenage daughter. But here he was a forceful, virile, powerful figure who at the end doesn't want to give up that power, and that really opened up the play for me as a metaphor for the human condition. Catherine Bush
Blaze Island Catherine Bush Goose Lane
The simple wooden house stands isolated in a windswept cove on Newfoundland's largest offshore island. And its influence on Catherine Bush's new novel has been profound.
“As soon as I stepped inside it, I said that my characters would have to live here,” Bush says. “I could walk the shore paths the way Miranda would. I really felt this world was coming up through my feet, and I learned to listen to the wind in a way I never had before.”
The wind is a major character in the novel that emerged — Blaze Island. Miranda is another. She's the daughter of a renowned climate scientist whose reputation has been shredded by a hostile establishment determined to discredit his warnings of environmental catastrophe. The two end up in exile on a tiny island in the North Atlantic, setting the stage for an elegantly crafted story that also proves to be a sizzling ecological thriller.
“A couple of years ago, Amitav Ghosh wrote a book called The Great Derangement in which he called out literary novelists for not writing about the climate crisis,” Bush says. So she responded with a tale about the aftermath of a devastating Category 5 hurricane that has swept up the Eastern seaboard and cut off the inhabitants of this island from the outside world.
Blaze Island's real-life counterpart is Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. To Bush, who has done several artist's residencies there, it is a place of wonder, asserting its own distinct identity and also carrying whispers of the unfathomable. That makes it a perfect companion for Bush's other inspiration — Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Several years ago, Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company mounted a groundbreaking production starring Patrick Stewart as Prospero, the powerful sorcerer living in embittered exile on an enchanted island with his daughter, Miranda.
“It's always hard to know where the spark of a novel comes from,” Bush, 59, says from her Toronto home. But she has never forgotten Stewart's portrayal.
“Too often, Prospero is an old, bearded man with a teenage daughter. But here he was a forceful, virile, powerful figure who at the end doesn't want to give up that power, and that really opened up the play for me as a metaphor for the human condition.”
Another startling aspect of that production was its Arctic setting, and as Bush felt more and more drawn to the idea of a cautionary tale about environmental disaster, various elements were coming into play.
One was her love for the natural world: “I've always had a strong feel for the natural world,” she says, “often being more at home with the non-human than the human.” Another was the presence in her life of a sister who is a climate scientist with Environment Canada. And, always, there was The Tempest.
“I felt — oh, Prospero can be a climate scientist and he can live in this remote northern island with his daughter. He can be desperate to protect her, and is also secretly cooking up this climate engineering plan.”
Bush may be portraying an island community showing resilience in the face of calamity, and she herself may be a staunch environmentalist, but she refuses to view the issues she raises in rigid black-andwhite terms. In her view, anyone pondering the climate crisis is also entering “a complex moral matrix of contradictory and competing human desires.”
As for this contemporary Prospero's foray into climate engineering — well, yes, the very idea triggers controversy. “It involves large-scale intervention, and there's a lot of debate about it — whether it's even possible, whether we should do it at all.”
Indeed, environmentalists have warned Bush not to go there in her story because it was morally corrupt and even dangerous. Bush's response: “It's a novel ... I'm not advocating for it. I'm exploring the desire for it.”
In Shakespeare's play, Prospero shipwrecks old enemies on his enchanted isle. In Blaze Island, the mainland visitors stranded on this storm-lashed strip of land have
their own murky agenda and see Miranda's father as an instrument in their questionable dream.
The novel's interconnections with The Tempest are fascinating — for example, the monster Caliban is reborn here as Caleb, a vulnerable young outsider who emerges as one of the novel's most endearing characters.
Indeed, despite her book's powerful sense of place and compelling narrative thrust, it's ultimately character-driven, with Prospero providing Bush with her most tantalizing challenge.
“I was wondering how a climate scientist could hold such grief and rage and despair. How can you maintain an intimate connection with others and your child when you're holding all this knowledge of a potentially terrible climatic future? How do you hold it in relation to your child, whom you love more than any other being?”
Bush has an abiding interest in how private lives and private crises can collide with larger public concerns. Her first novel, Minus Time, dealt with a female astronaut whose daughter becomes involved with eco-activists. “I increasingly feel that the climate crisis is defining how I see the world.”
An air of forbidding, of uncer
tainty, hangs over a novel that ends with islanders still unconnected with the mainland world. Radio remains dominated by ominous static; water and gasoline rationing is imposed. But islanders remain resilient under stress — a quality reflective of Bush's own experience of Fogo.
“One of the book's early Fogo readers said to me that after a huge storm there's always a kind of cheerfulness because everybody responds to the challenge of making do in extremity, so it was important to have that energy in the novel.
“I wanted to write a story that wasn't apocalyptic or dystopic,” Bush says, “a novel that had some hope and would shift the balance between the human and other elements.”
And if there's mystery in some of those other elements, so be it.
“It encourages me as a writer to shift away from the wholly human and make the non-human element — wind and air, plants and animals — present, as well,” she says. “I want readers to be enchanted and transformed, to see their own world differently, to think about possibilities. I want to be a storyteller, but I think all good storytelling should change us somehow.”