This week’s #FictionFriday is brought to you by Chiara van Ommeren
This month Jenny Offill’s new book was published, Weather. I was lucky enough to buy the last copy Waterstones had in store. I was clearly not the only one who couldn’t wait to read it.
Offill’s book is described as part of the ‘CliFi’ genre, ‘climate fiction’, a genre about climate change and global warming. The protagonist works for a podcast producer, whose podcast is called ‘Hell and High Water’. Her job is to respond to letters from listeners panicking about climate collapse, ‘How will the last generation know that it is the last generation?’ But the power in Offill’s work is not how she describes big apocalyptic scenes full of dread, she doesn't write external scenarios, she writes about internal thoughts. What makes her work so powerful and gripping is because it is so relatable. It is about a woman dealing with everyday life and worrying about her son and his future.
Most of all, Weather is about time. ‘My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.’ Little remarks throughout the book remind the reader of passing time, ‘And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.’, especially effective when Offill connects it to the future of her protagonist’s son. How long do we still have?
‘Eli is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which will still work. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047.’
It’s not only the fragmented thoughts themselves that are so powerful, but also the silences, the white spaces, between them. The way they demand the reader to pay attention to what they’re reading, asking them to step in, to supply the connections between the snippets.
Time slipping by in connection to feeling the need to do something is a strong emotion for the protagonist. ‘I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action.’ At the same time, she feels that no-one is paying attention to the destruction of our liveable world. Offill shows that we ourselves, the readers, are like the protagonist, living on a planet we are killing without stopping to think about the destruction we are causing. Again, she highlights this with simple harmless examples, demanding the reader pay attention to something that might be slipping away.
‘When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)’