APOCALYPSE NOW?

KF: Like many readers, I was happy to see a new book on the Anthropocene. And I was pleasantly surprised by your preoccupation in this book with the limitations of the novel as genre, and of fiction in general, in grappling with the crisis of climate change. But while you talk about the innate limitations of the novel as a form that is implicated in the pathologies of modernity, I think of how so much popular Hollywood cinema deals, fairly directly, with the very catastrophe your new (non-fiction) addresses: I mean natural disaster movies from The Poseidon Adventure back in the day to The Day After, to Armageddon, San Andreas, Dante’s Peak, tornado films… AG: I love them! KF: I imagine you would, but do you think that perhaps cinema is superseding fiction? AG: On this front certainly, cinema is much more responsive to this kind of thing than fiction has been. The question for me is why is it that the mainstream, what we consider ‘serious’ in fiction, excludes phe- nomena like these—and as soon as you ask yourself that, you realise that what is really in crisis is exactly this notion of seriousness. What is constituted, as it were, as the beating heart of bourgeois seriousness—because the bourgeois is nothing if not serious. And you realise that the seriousness itself is a kind of derangement. KF: But at the same time, in publishing circles, people talk about the rise of non-fiction, and in that sense, there’s nothing wrong with addressing ‘the serious’ precisely as you have done, with non-fiction, with essays. AG: No, there’s nothing wrong with that. But then is it enough? No. I don’t feel that. See, for me, I am primarily a novelist, so the question of how to address these issues through fiction is naturally a question that haunts me. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is that, at a more general level, the issue is how do you create a narrative around subjects like these? And the great difficulty with climate change that everybody is facing now is that it doesn’t seem to have a narrative. It’s defying narrative. And I think that’s not a job you can leave to politicians. That’s a job for people who work in the arts. KF: On that note, what next? AG: I have another short non-fiction project based on my research for the Ibis trilogy. So that’s the next thing. KF: And fiction, will you return to it? AG: I’ve actually been writing a little bit of fiction in such time as I get. No, no, fiction is absolutely what I do.

“THE DIFFICULTY WITH CLIMATE CHANGE THAT EVERYBODY IS FACING IS THAT IT DOES NOT HAVE A NARRATIVE”