Wuthering depths: the Brontë country graphic novel about floods and fracking
Rain is hammering down on Mary and Bryan Talbot’s back garden, shaking a majestic rowan tree laden with bright orange berries. It’s a beautiful sight, but it worries them. Birds have usually stripped the berries by now, Mary explains. Does this mean the avian population of Sunderland is in decline?
A rowan tree closely modelled on this one plays a dramatic role in their new graphic novel, which is driven by just such environmental concerns. Rain is the fourth project of the author-illustrator team, who made history in 2012 by winning the Costa biography prize with Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, their collaborative debut which combined an autobiographical account of Mary’s life as the daughter of a distinguished James Joyce scholar with the story of Joyce’s daughter Lucia.
Rain, their first venture into contemporary fiction, tells the story of two young women: London-based journalist Cath and Yorkshire environmentalist Mitch, whose burgeoning romance is set against a background of ecological crisis. Lest there be any doubt about their politics, Mitch has a cat called Nige (“named after Nigel Farage – because he’s a wee shite”).
The idea came to them during the Christmas of 2015, as torrential rain swept the north of England. Mary was struggling to find a new biographical subject. “We were sitting here watching TV,” says Bryan. “Earlier in the day, Mary had been having a go at me because I’d bought a body scrub with microbeads in it. Then the floods came on the news and I said, ‘This is really what you should be writing about.’”
Mary set the story in a fictionalised version of Hebden Bridge, a town in the heart of Yorkshire’s Brontë country that was catastrophically flooded on Boxing Day 2015 when its river burst its banks. Her research took her out to the Yorkshire moors, where she found that intensive grouse-rearing was destroying ancient boglands. The statistics are shocking: in 10 years, the book informs us, the number of birds shot on a single estate increased from 100 to 3,000 brace (or 6,000 birds).
This “industrialisation” of grouseshooting, she discovered, has been achieved by exterminating predators, while disrupting the water table with drainage channels and burning the heather on the ancient peat bogs so that the young birds can fatten up on the tender new shoots. The villain of Rain is the gamekeeper. An RSPB spy lurks in the bushes, trying to catch him setting illegal traps for birds of prey, while environmental activists debate tactics ranging from demonstrations to sabotage.
Hebden Bridge is clearly recognisable in Bryan’s illustrations, though names of locations and characters have been changed. The Talbots are no strangers to debates around political action. Their second book, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (with illustrator Kate Charlesworth), was about a fictional maid who gets swept up in the suffrage movement in Edwardian London after going to work for the Pankhursts. Their third, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, told the story of revolutionary Louise Michel, who fought for the Paris Commune in 1871 .
In Rain, the action sweeps from Yorkshire to Surrey, where the father of one of the lovers is facing a different environmental threat: fracking. The role of Cath’s dad is partly to widen the geographical range, but also to complicate the political picture. In the written text, he initially appears to be stereotypically white, stale and male, defending traditional country sports, enjoying clay-pigeon shooting and mocking Cath’s tree-hugging friends. But the illustrations tell a more nuanced story: on the wall of his fairytale cottage, careful readers will notice a wedding portrait of a longhaired hippie and his Indian bride.
Such subtextual games will come as no surprise to fans of Bryan, a comics pioneer who made his name on the 1970s underground scene, and whose work has always been densely layered and allusive. “Disguise is an art form,” says Inspector LeBrock, the badger sleuth, in one frame of his five-volume Grandville series. Behind him hangs a vicar’s cassock – a reference, Bryan explained in an annotated version on his website, to Sherlock Holmes’s disguise in an early short story, A Scandal in Bohemia.
Rain features an off-licence called Earnshaws and a cafe named Joe’s, both allusions to characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Apart from being about another moors-set love affair involving a Yorkshirewoman and someone who is probably of mixed race, the Brontë connection underlines the gap between a heritage view of the English countryside and what is actually going on.
Sitting on a huge, scuffed leather sofa in their front room, gazing out at the rain, the Talbots are affectionately stern with each other. “You’re not going to give your history lecture,” scolds Mary, as Bryan explains the limitations of the term “graphic novel”. Their bodyscrub set-to is echoed in Rain, when Cath outrages Mitch by buying a bottle of weedkiller because she’s fed up of “pulling up bloody dandelions”. Mary is the gardener in the family. (“You’re a Mitch, you grow eight varieties of chilli,” Bryan tells her. “I’m a combination of both, arguing amongst themselves,” she replies.) A chilli plant glides brightly through the book, swept from Mitch’s windowsill into the chaos of the flood.
Historical context is irresistible to Mary, a university academic who wrote books about language and gender before taking early retirement to write full time. She frames the story with a thumbnail-sketch of the 18th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who was the first writer to recognise the dangers of deforestation. She goes on to invoke France’s “zone rouge” – land still contaminated by the detritus of first world war – as evidence of the lasting dangers of industrialised killing.
Environmental arguments around Brexit are wryly dispatched: the European Commission, the novel suggests, is both ally and enemy to everyone.
The story ends at the start of 2016 on a note of optimism that now seems deeply ironic. “I suspect if I were to start to write the book now,” says Mary, “it would have a greater sense of urgency and I might find it harder to be optimistic. Even the Arctic is on fire, for goodness sake.”
• This article was amended on 2 October 2019 because an earlier version was incorrect to say that Louise Michel “fought for the Paris Commune in the French revolution”. We meant to refer to her role in the Paris Commune uprising in 1871.
•Rain is published by Jonathan Cape on 3 October.