A brief and unusual work of climate fiction, this. Raymond gets straight into an early-2050s US, and a world in which popular anger saw not only some sort of transition away from fossil fuels (in some nations), but also a run of very public prosecutions of bigwigs from Big Carbon: life sentences, the occasional hanging, that sort of thing. That all happened back in the Thirties; in the book’s present, things are still getting worse with regard to the climate, but also economically and sociotechnically, and there’s a sense that things are backsliding from that earlier optimism, as a new generation of kids picks up the old slogans as a stick with which to beat the generation before them.
Jack Henry is a middle-aged journalist who gets an unlikely tip-off regarding one of the “Empty Chairs”—someone sentenced in absentia during the Toronto Trials—which, on further investigation, turns out to be true. Robert Cave is living a fairly quiet life in south of the border in Guadalajara, and so Henry and colleagues make plans to bring him in with a dramatic on-camera unmasking. In the meantime, Henry frets about the prions recently diagnosed in his eyeball, about the woman he first knew back in his twenties who he’s recently started seeing, and about Cave, with whom he has unintentionally struck up more of a friendship than intended.

I was a little furious at this book when I found it on the shelf, and that’s why I bought it: the blurb implied it was based on an idea that I’ve had sat in my ideas-pile for many years. And that’s true, in a way: Denial is a climate-villain-unmasking story, but it’s hugely different in almost every way to the approach I had thought of, and almost certainly a vastly better book for that. It is, for want of a less general descriptor, a very literary take on the issue, which is to say it’s driven by drama rather than melodrama, and all the allusive material through which the novel earns its title could easily pass you by if you were accustomed only to the heavy-handed symbolism of genre fiction. (That, to be clear, is a mea culpa: I would have been baffled by this book had I read it just five years earlier, before making a concerted effort to broaden my palate.) It’s a moral fiction, but it is not a moralising fiction—and that quiet refusal to stand in condemnation may explain why I had heard nothing about it at all before finding it on the oddities shelf at the Science Fiction Bookstore in Malmö.
(Granted I don’t read a lot of “true” litfic, but Raymond’s almost obscene list of of achievements includes screenwriting for cinema and television alike, and goes a long way to explaining his deft and understated yet occasionally luminous style on the page. He’s very good—so good, in fact, that he feels zero need to show off how good he is.)
Ultimately my idea is still mine to attempt, but Raymond’s book leaves me a rather different obstacle to deal with: perhaps vengeance in advance is even more pointless than vengeance long after the fact? The great conflicts of an era are combinatory expressions of the countless smaller dramas and ambiguities that make up the little lives we lead—but the opportunity to explore at either end of that scale has not been denied to me.
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