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A New Novel Confronts the Scale and Gravity of Climate Change [1]

['Hamilton Cain']

Date: 2023-01-10

THE DELUGE, by Stephen Markley

“Après nous, le déluge,” Louis XV quipped to his mistress and political adviser Madame de Pompadour, waving his hand, one imagines, from a mirrored hall of royal privilege. The conceit has trickled down to us, now a portent of climatic doom. The floodwaters loom, largely because of our own indifference and negligence. As heat records shatter, as polar icecaps melt, as oceans swell and creep inland, we face the danger of a mass-extinction event, the sixth in the planet’s history. This time, we’re going to need a bigger ark.

Stephen Markley’s bracing, beguiling, uneven new novel, “The Deluge,” tracks a cadre of radicalized scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of the 2040s. The dystopia is realistic and nuanced, grim but playful, setting Markley’s book apart from the tsunami of recent climate-change literature. In discrete chapters he introduces us to the core of his Cecil B. DeMille cast: Tony Pietrus, a maverick, visionary researcher; the charismatic Kate Morris, equal parts riot grrrl and skilled political operative; Matt, her quiet, conflicted partner; Shane, a single mother who foments eco-terrorism; Keeper, a recovering OxyContin addict whose sections Markley narrates in second person; a former marketing wunderkind, Jackie; the Pastor, a Hollywood actor turned religious zealot; and Ashir al-Hasan, or Ash, a gay, neurodivergent mathematician. Markley rounds out his leads with an array of supporting players, all veering toward a potential cataclysm: a six-degree spike in mean global temperatures.

They’re ready to rumble, this crew. Their roads meander across the novel’s dusty, scorched landscape but eventually converge in the late 2020s, when a Black Republican woman takes the oath of office as president, vowing restrictions on carbon emissions. Markley’s world-building is superb, his language tactile. Dr. Pietrus pictures undersea methane “belching up from cracks in the rock, little farts in the dark, that sent schools of pebble-sized bubbles ascending. Or gurgling from invisible pores in the sediment of the ocean floor, beading up, clinging momentarily, and then writhing free of a soft sand carpet … they climbed through frigid water. A mad poetry scrawled in the unseen corners of the oceans’ expanse.” Social upheavals, too, erupt throughout the novel, from economic crises to martial law.

“The Deluge” is long on ambition. It’s also long, weighing in at nearly 900 pages — baggy, restless, immersive. Centrifugal forces threaten to tear it apart, but Markley soldiers on, in hyper-real mode. A kind of metanovel floats just above the surface of “The Deluge,” satire that reads like a darker, dissonant riff on Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors,” unfolding in collages of tabloid headlines, Vanity Fair profiles and opinion pieces by the likes of Al Gore, interspersed among the chapters. The author’s just as fascinated with the sausage-making of legislation as with greenhouse gases. Kate and her grass-roots organization, A Fierce Blue Fire, emerge as rainmakers in congressional races; both sides of the aisle court them. Markley lets the zingers fly — Kate admits to her colleagues that “even I’m sick of Greta! I’m sick of A.O.C.!” — but the caricature wears thin and the jokes don’t always land.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/books/review/stephen-markley-deluge.html

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