Jane Rawson

This is the text of a ‘provocation’ I presented at a conference on ‘storying climate change’, held at the University of Melbourne in early 2020, as the pandemic was just beginning.

I am not now nor have I ever been an academic. What I want to talk about today is based not on any rigorous research but on my own practice as a reader and writer.

I have written three books of fiction, two of them about the mess our world is in. In the first, a woman has lost her husband, home and job to the effects of climate change, and lives a marginal existence in a falling-apart Melbourne. She’s been writing a story set in an imaginary, 20^th century San Francisco. At the end of my novel she gets the choice of continuing to live in her unpredictable, uncontrollable reality or going to live in her comfortable, fun, but necessarily constrained imaginary world, and she chooses the latter.

The second is set in the 19^th century. A man is shipwrecked and saved by a mysterious woman. Back on land, he cannot find her and becomes obsessed with her, thinking she is a malign force from the ocean. She is actually a refugee from another dimension, trapped on earth and looking for the rest of her kind. She wants to be accepted – he doesn’t understand her and wants to destroy her, thinking it will make him safe. In the end, she shows him the universe is much bigger than he has fathomed and that there is kindness all around him if he looks for it. She turns into a cat and they go home together to spend time with the man’s son, happy with the simple, wonderful things of life.

As a Goodreads reviewer said, ‘This is the second of Jane Rawson’s books that I’ve read and I love her style. That said, I’ve felt let down by the endings in both stories. They seemed to dissipate rather than close. I’m totally ok with loose ends but these seem more to lose momentum and drift off.’

I am trying to reform my ways as a writer. The novel I’m currently working on is set in Adelaide in the 1930s. A group of young women are trying to smash the patriarchy, using their mild magical powers. These witches eventually come up against a group of Nazi sympathisers; the witches lose and Australia becomes a fascist state. How will the women resist an authoritarian power? How do you save your future when the government is actively working to destroy it? The situation is a fairly blunt and obvious analogy for some aspects of current-day Australia. In a realistic ending, they would be defeated, either by relentless but dull state violence, or by despair and exhaustion. Alternatively, they might choose to leverage whatever privilege they have and find a niche in the status quo. In a conventional ending, they would heroically take on the evil overlords and destroy them, reinstating a good and just society; alternatively, they might be heroically killed, but their sacrifice would be enough to set off a chain of events which would topple the government.

Neither of these endings is satisfying to me. It feels irresponsible to write a story, given our current situation, in which characters struggling to make change and bring about a fairer world are utterly defeated and all is hopeless. It seems stupid and hollow, though, to suggest a few clever, plucky people – heroes – might be able to undo the damage done by centuries of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.

So I’ve been investigating how one might write an ending for an Anthropocene work of fiction that is realistic and satisfying and ethically supportable without just ‘losing momentum and drifting off’. And what I’ve found is no one is really nailing it.

Here are four examples of recent works I’ve consumed.

The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers: an unconventional structure where the struggle against deforestation is fought by many humans and also trees, and which features collective action rather than heroism. The crisis is not averted. The world keeps getting worse. But if we see things on the timescale of trees instead of humans, there is hope. Powers writes, ‘The earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again…once the real world ends.’ Readers, generally, got a great deal from the first parts of this book and were confounded or disappointed by the last.

Years and Years, a BBC series by Russel T Davies: In a near-future Britain, the economy and environment are collapsing, there’s a repressive populist government and nuclear war looms. One family fragments, suffers and eventually fights back. In the end, they stage a clever heist operation, uncover some corruption, call the cops, the government is unseated and everyone lives happily ever after. If we work together we can win! This ending was completely unbelievable and wildly unsatisfying – the protagonists’ response was, in reality, far too meagre to overcome the massive scale of disaster they were facing.

The Absolute Book, a novel by Elizabeth Knox: Some of this book takes place in our own messed-up world, some takes place in a parallel world right by ours that is a battleground for fairies and demons. As one reviewer wrote, the beautiful are cruel, the cruel are sad, the demons are capable of good, those lost find themselves. In the end, the fairies rescue us, but the way they do it is harsh and heartless and millions of us die. Knox says in an interview, ‘Would it be so terrible if revolutionary changes were made for our own good?’ The Absolute Book suggests story can save us, but the story is far more complicated, oblique and disturbing than we expect. This ending is very strange, incomprehensible and somehow extremely satisfying.

The Heavens, a novel by Sandra Newman: Kate lives in two worlds. The first is like our own, but more decent, kind, cleaner and more thoughtful; the other is her dreamlife, in Elizabethan England. Kate’s dreams are vivid and coherent and very important to her, but every time she dreams it somehow makes her ‘real’ world worse – wars break out, environmental destruction takes place, friends die. Can she exist and not break the world? Eventually, Kate decides to live a small and good life, but gives up on her dreams of something wilder and more beautiful. The novel ends like this: At last Ben said, ‘I could help save the world’. ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I think we could be happy. But there isn’t any way to save this world.’ An emotionally and artistically satisfying but ethically questionable ending.

So my question to you is, how should we leave the consumers of fictions we write about climate change and ecocide? What should they think and feel as they close the book or the laptop? Should they be full of despair, but comprehending the scale of the problem? Should they have a non-specific or unrealistic, but energising, hope? Should they be left thoughtful, confused; in an ambiguous and complex state of being that might sit in the background of their life for weeks and months? Or should we just write whatever moves us, regardless of the consequences? What is a writer’s responsibility for endings in the Anthropocene? And have you read any good ones?