{"id":189,"date":"2016-03-27T15:35:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-27T15:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/?p=189"},"modified":"2016-03-27T15:35:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T15:35:00","slug":"2016-3-27-midland-and-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/?p=189","title":{"rendered":"Midland and the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Happy Easter everyone. To mark the day, a traditional time of renewal and rebirth, I thought I\u2019d share some thoughts.<\/p>\n

As I posted to Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I recently read Oliver Morton\u2019s marvellous book  The Planet Remade<\/a>. Ollie was my editor back when I was a tyro journalist working on Wired UK, and we still keep in touch. He works for the Economist now, and his books on Mars and photosynthesis are both excellent. But The Planet Remade is something really special.<\/p>\n

The book elaborates the pitfalls and potentials of geoengineering the Earth\u2019s climate, a subject in which Oliver is something of an expert having reported on it for many years. He argues that mankind has in fact been engaging in geoengineering for some time: by releasing vast amounts of greenhouses gases through the burning of fossil fuels, obviously, but also (and more purposefully) by \u201cspeeding up and rerouting\u201d the nitrogen cycle by fixing nitrogen into synthetic fertilisers on an industrial scale.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going summarise the book here; all that matters for this post is that it elegantly describes those human activities sufficiently pervasive and impactful upon the environment to have created an identifiable \u201clayer\u201d in the geological record, and thus to have (arguably) kicked off a new geological period: the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s this got to do with Midland? Well, Midland – like  Habitus<\/a>  and  The Book of Ash<\/a>  before it – is a novel that tries to map some of emotional dynamics taking place as humanity tries to deal with this.<\/p>\n

A country boy who moved to the city, the relationship between the natural and the technological has always preoccupied me. It has informed all of my writing since I wrote my first half decent poem aged 17, penned one night as I sat up manning the corn dryer on the local farm where I worked during my teenage summers. And it still does – those same concerns and that same farm feature in Midland, as in the extract I recently posted to the Shed (only accessible by pledged supporters).<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve read Habitus these concerns are quite explicit – the hyperreal techniques I used in that book, inspired by Ovid\u2019s  Metamorphoses<\/a>  (and Kafka’s  The Metamorphosis<\/a>), allowed me to have the characters quite literally transform into the symbols they had begun to represent.<\/p>\n

In The Book of Ash I fictionalised the story of the nuclear artist  James Acord<\/a>  because I could address these concerns through his life and work. Interestingly, Acord\u2019s art – along with the work of  Simon Faithfull<\/a>  and  Olafur Eliasson<\/a>, other artists whose work I find very inspiring – is being included, posthumously, in a forthcoming exhibition on the Anthropocene<\/a>  to be staged in Ostend later this year to coincide with World Ocean Day.<\/p>\n

Midland begins with its characters confronting nature as a sublime force, nature as overarching \u201cother\u201d. This is the sublimity of the Romantics, which Alex likes to think he experiences in the first section of the book, Whale (see the extract on the  Midland homepage<\/a>), and which his environmentalist brother Matthew has devoted his life to trying to protect.<\/p>\n

The book ends with Alex starting to look on the earth\u2019s environment in a different way: as always mediated by the human. It\u2019s an understanding symbolised, not by the  whale lost in the Thames<\/a>, but by the  giant mechanical elephant<\/a>  brought to London by the Royal de Luxe theatre company in 2006.<\/p>\n

When I started the novel back in 2006 I very consciously chose to bookend it with those images, as it seemed to me that they captured something essential about the locus of change in the times that we\u2019re living in. The book\u2019s narrative was then developed as a kind of filigree or tracing of an imagined topology charted as one symbol morphed into the other in London\u2019s carnival of spectacle over a period of around five months.<\/p>\n

It was a technique I adapted from one developed by the French writer  Raymond Roussel<\/a>  around a century ago. Roussel would begin with two almost but not quite identical sentences – one to start and one to end the work – and then try and find the tale that connected them, hoping to capture something meaningful in the locus of the narrative arc thus described (the mathematical term itself features in the title of his most famous such novel, Locus Solus).<\/p>\n

Roussel\u2019s works are brilliant but weird (or, rather, brilliantly weird). Though not much read in his lifetime – fortunately for him he inherited a fairly large fortune and was able to self-fund his work – his writing later became a big influence on the  Surrealists<\/a>,  Oulipo<\/a>  and the poets of the  New York School<\/a>. The writing style of Midland has little in common with that of Roussel\u2019s books (though here I am crowdfunding my novel, so maybe I have more in common with Roussel than I think. Hopefully I won’t overdose on barbiturates in a Palermo hotel room when I finally run out of money, as he did). But what it does share is the ambition that by exploding the moment between two images a wider truth can be captured, like a holographic fragment of a much larger picture. And when I read The Planet Remade it brought three decades\u2019 worth of concerns about what we are doing to the Earth and how that is changing our society into sharp focus for me. It was, if you like, the best description I\u2019d read of my book\u2019s (and my books’) context. This was the story a particular arc of which I was trying to describe.<\/p>\n

We live at a moment in history when mankind\u2019s very success has rebounded on it, disorienting us and rendering us rudderless and confused. Midland tries to capture something about the subjective experience of being alive, of what it\u2019s like to try to make sense of your life, at this time. The Planet Remade presents a much more objective account of what this moment is and what it means.<\/p>\n

Do read them both!<\/p>\n

And have a great Easter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Easter everyone. To mark the day, a traditional time of renewal and rebirth, I thought I\u2019d share some thoughts. As I posted to Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I recently read Oliver Morton\u2019s marvellous book  The Planet Remade. Ollie was my editor back when I was a tyro journalist working on Wired UK, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,22],"tags":[19,21],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-fiction","tag-climate-change","tag-midland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesflint.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}