In his introduction to Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen describes our present world as “one in which we are never done talking about natural disasters but fail to acknowledge their anthropogenic origins: the sociopolitical and cultural realities actively constructed through histories of extraction and empire”.
But who are these we? Not the swelling numbers of citizens – of voters – who very readily make the connection between capitalist economic systems of extraction and consumption, and the ever-intensifying climate emergency. And certainly not the very many Irish writers who have engaged with passion and verve in matters of nature, environment and landscape in an age of climate breakdown.
This is, then, an oddly loose note in an otherwise taut and impressive study which offers illuminating and frequently poignant readings of writers including Eavan Boland, Mike McCormack, Claire Kilroy, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Sen’s studies of the work of Moya Cannon, Sara Baume and Kevin Barry are especially instructive and moving. In her novel A Line Made by Walking, Baume evokes the sensations of homelessness, exile and helpless despair that accompany our individual lives in a time of environmental emergency. As Baume’s protagonist says: “The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and I don’t think I can bear it any more. The world is wrong and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed."
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Sen reads this book against Barry’s short story Fjord of Killary, which satirises a “business-as-usual” mindset in the face of climate breakdown. The juxtaposition of these two texts is highly effective and exemplifies the wide environmental ground covered in contemporary Irish writing.
Cannon’s work, meanwhile, views nation and world both from the perspective of deep planetary time and from the edge – from shores, strands, estuaries, from the ocean – in a way, Sen suggests, that both disturbs established notions of home and national sovereignty, and connects Irish and global issues of flood and climate-enforced migration. “Some echo under the stones seduces our feet,” writes Cannon, “leads them down again by the grey, agitated sea.”
Sen himself responds to these images of edgelands, asking the reader to reimagine the notion of sovereignty as being “from above, and beneath, and just beyond what we understand the territory of national states to be”.
