Audiobook Review
The Deluge (2023)
by Stephen Markley
I read the reviews of The Deluge, Stephen Markley's "brilliant but uneven" 900 page long climate apocalypse novel with a tinge of despair. I continue to have great difficulty post covid (last June!) when it comes to reading a book, I used to be able to read complex non fiction and literary fiction for hours on end without respite, now I get distracted after ten minutes. BUT I did manage to snag a copy of the 41 hour(!) audiobook from the Los Angeles Public library. I consider myself quite a connoisseur of the literary apocalypse- I must have read at least 30 books on the subject of apocalypse literary fiction and another dozen that would be considered genre works- science fiction, horror etc. And of course I've dabbled to a greater or lesser degree in the television shows and what not.
After all that experience I am still left with some major unanswered questions. Chief among those: How, exactly, does the apocalypse go down? Most texts start at the proverbial "day after" and those that deal with the "fall" tend to be staged from a single person trying to escape the immediate consequence of the collapse of a civilization. None of the books I've read- the genre fiction title 2034: A Novel of the Next World War- which takes you all the way through a nuclear war between the US and China- being the exception- actually detail how the world ends.
Stephen Markley aims to fill that void with The Deluge which is a gigantic sprawling mess of a book that proved tedious to read but, like the slow rolling climate disasters of the book, ends up packing a wallop. The plot of the deluge seems like something Markley came up as a kind of coat rack to develop his central narrative of the shape and feeling of the end of the world at the hands of global warming/climate change caused by increased carbon counts in the atmosphere. First and foremost, The Deluge is a book about the human made disaster of climate change and the forms that disaster will take in the next several decades.
Talking about the individual characters verges on the absurd since they all exist as placeholders for different parts of the narrative- you've got the "manic pixie dreambgirl" of global warming, Kate Morris, who works for change from within while her own appetites run wild. There is the gay, autistic, muslim science advisor to the government who provides lengthy briefings peppered with personal anecdotes. There is the poor, white, ex-drug addict Midwesterner swept up into the ecoterrorism movement, there are the ecoterrorists themselves, the list goes on. Markley intersperses these personal narratives with interstitial newspaper articles, television reports and later monologues delivered from inside personal VR universes.
The events of the novel itself are the visceral equivalent of torture porn for American democracy- Markley, gleefully, I imagine, takes America of the near future off the deep end of electoral democracy and then lingers- I must say- I went to college in Washington DC and the detail with which he depths to which American democracy sinks left me, at times, breathless. It's not all genius but as a novel of ideas The Deluge left me stunned, and, it might be worth, noting, wondering if Markley is advocating the violent assassination of "climate villains" and the nationalization of the American oil industry... because it kind of seems like it.
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