Earth is in peril - but must literature be as well?

FICTION: The Age of Miracles By Karen Thompson Walker Simon & Schuster, 269pp. £12

THE AGE OF MIRACLES is a novel set in California in the immediate future. The narrator is 23-year-old Julia, and the story she tells concerns the end of her childhood, around her 12th birthday.

At the novel’s start, as the adult Julia explains, the child Julia, who has no siblings, is living the familiar life of a prosperous middleclass American child when, without explanation, Earth’s diurnal rotation starts to slow, first by seconds, then by minutes and finally by hours. Julia’s physiology and psyche are indifferent to “the slowing”, so, as gravity increases, the seasons end, all the whales and birds die and agricultural production collapses, she goes on regardless – and this dual story, the planet’s and hers, is the story we’re given.

The world’s story is partial, however; Julia doesn’t really pay attention to what’s happening except as it affects her. This in turn means her science is patchy and her account of the collapse of the world’s ecosystem is incomplete – but I didn’t mind this because that’s exactly what I’d expect: cusp adolescents are self-centred. This use of the unreliable narrator is ingenious.

There are other things to enjoy as well: the language, for instance, is simple and spare, but unlike the language of, say, Hemingway, which was intended to shock, awe and impress, Karen Thompson Walker’s is intended to deflect attention; it is an expression of her modesty. The novel’s structure and the control she exercises over her material are similarly unostentatious. There are no tricks, no attention-seeking displays and no tampering with chronology or withholding of key facts for dramatic effect or to excite appetite (with a single exception, which comes at the end and is therefore completely excusable). On the contrary, there is just quiet, steadfast storytelling throughout, as well as perfect clarity about where we are in time and whether we’re with Julia the adult or Julia the child.

Simon & Schuster urges readers to take time out of their busy lives to read the book because it’s “one of those rare novels that make us consider the way we look at the world”, as well as being “the wake-up call that we all need”.

As a warning to mankind, this novel may or not work, though I doubt it will have any effect on the greed that’s the primary motor for our degradation of the environment. As for the argument that this work can refashion reader perceptions, I feel much more competent to pronounce. There are books that can cause a reader to re-evaluate, but The Age of Miracles isn’t one of them: yes, it’s a good book, literate and well made, but I don’t believe it’s going to achieve what the publisher claims. It’s simply not great enough.

So we have publisher’s claims that can’t be supported. This seems a bit iffy; it’s also, we must remember, a marketing tactic. As crimes against literature go, this isn’t that terrible, but it does indicate the way that publishing is going, and, for that reason, this novel worries me.

In the old model, writers read and wrote and made themselves writers. There was training – I got mine at the National Film School in the UK – but it was technical rather than aesthetic. Now, at least in the US, the new model is for master of fine arts programmes to do the work that writers used to do alone. Karen Thompson Walker is a double MFA graduate – she studied at UCLA and Columbia – and this novel (and I speak as one who has taught MFA programmes and is hugely grateful that I was paid to do so) is saturated with the virtues these programmes traditionally seek to inculcate – purity, clarity and simplicity, for example. The reason, therefore, for Simon Schuster’s claims, I suspect, is that, like many publishers, it believes the MFA-trained thoroughbred is the one to back.

The rise of the MFA-trained writer in the US and the MA-trained writer here is part of a bigger process: the professionalisation of literature. It can’t be stopped any more than King Canute could stop the tide. As a writer who came out of the preprofessional system I fear the new model. This is partly selfish: I dread the eclipse of my tradition (a feeling that informs my attitude to this novel). I also see it as a dangerous harbinger, and thus it also makes me fearful for literature in general. It makes me suspect that, in future, publishers will prefer the work of MFA graduates and will ignore the work of the untrained, the wild.

If that comes to pass (and it might well), then literature’s ecosystem will suffer as surely as Earth’s does in this novel, for if only one kind of writer is favoured, then a lot of our literary flora and fauna will die. Can that be a good thing? I can’t think so. We need a mix, surely, a garden with weeds as well as flowers.

Carlo Gébler is a writer; his memoir, Confessions of a Catastrophist, will shortly be published by Lagan Press