Every year around this time, I find myself pondering one of the great questions of life: what to take with me to read on holiday?
As I read a lot of non-fiction on environmental and social themes, I usually read fiction while on holiday. There’s no harm in reading something entirely escapist, but often I end up reading novels that explore the world we live in from a fresh perspective, shedding a different light on the problems we face. I’ve written about the value of fiction in imagining a better world on Joy in Enough before, but here are two other possibilities.
After recommendations from Tim Jackson and (friend of Joy in Enough) Ian Christie, I chose Russell Hoban’s dystopian novel Riddley Walker as one of my summer reads. It tells the story of a young man exiled from his community, set in Kent a thousand years after a nuclear disaster that has caused society to revert to the iron age. Hoban imagines that language itself has devolved and literacy is rare, and the writing is an imaginative and often wryly humorous mangling of English.
In Riddley’s future, our current way of life has become a distorted and quasi-religious mythology that is passed down through storytelling. Humans unlocked ‘the clevverness’ and they had planes, and TV, and computers – and ultimately the weaponry that brought this all to a close. What a waste of progress, the book implies – “every thing good and every body happy and teckernogical progers moving every thing frontways farther and farther all the time”.
Rowan Williams recently wrote about the book too, comparing the threats today with the ones Hoban was responding to in 1980. “Global politics is trapped in zero-sum games,” he writes, “and the massive menace of a climate crisis is as terrifying a prospect as the nuclear horrors described in Riddley Walker. It is time for us to look unmercifully at our expectations of limitless economic growth — a fantasy that will eventually strip us of all power to manage our environment.”
Perhaps a dystopia isn’t the kind of thing you want to read while on holiday, so how about a book with a similar premise in which everything turned out alright? Becky Chambers’ book A Psalm for the Wild-Built tells the story of a ‘tea monk’ called Dex. They have a sort of chaplaincy role which involves making tea and listening. Disillusioned with this calling, Dex wanders into the wilderness and meets a robot who seeks to understand humans.
This is unexpected, as robots left human civilisation centuries before and nobody has seen one since. Like Riddley Walker’s world, the technologies of the past are mythological and barely understood, as people make do with a simpler life on the other side of a crisis. But where Hoban imagines a dog eat dog world of scarcity and violence, Chambers finds a humanity at peace with less, still capable – or perhaps more capable – of kindness and compassion.
As Christians, we have a hopeful view of the long-term future, but the decisions we make in the interim shape the world we live in, and the one that our children will inherit. Contrasting futures like these ones echo the words of Moses in Deuteronomy 30, “see, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.” He urged the people of Israel to consider these paths and ‘choose life’.
That’s an invitation we face today, in very different circumstances. We know that our consumer way of life is unsustainable and cannot continue. But how it ends, and what life looks like on the other side, remains to be seen. The decisions we make now will affect future generations for many years into the future, and maybe considering these questions through fiction this summer can open up some different ways forward.
Joy in Enough 