![]() ![]() ![]() Two years ago, when Ian McEwan published, “Solar,” his novel about rising CO 2 levels, he admitted that “the best way to tell people about climate change is through nonfiction.” Boyle, Lydia Millet and Margaret Atwood are already preaching to the overheated choir. The weakest sections of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” are those that hector us about the loss of songbirds. And who exactly would be converted by these missing environmental stories? Are oil lobbyists just one good climate-change novel away from seeing the error of their ways?Īctually, unlike our cowardly presidential candidates, a number of major novelists have raised alarms about the Earth’s health, but novels aren’t particularly effective at articulating political positions or scientific facts. ![]() I’d push the last polar bear off his melting ice floe to avoid that. Imagine if “most characters in most novels” lectured each other about climate change. ![]() “We don’t want to have this conversation,” complained Daniel Kramb, “and neither do most characters in most novels being published.”Īs Paul Ryan would say, the dangers of this so-called crisis are debatable. Earlier this month, a writer in the Guardian lamented the scarcity of novels about “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”: climate change. ![]()
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