Despite a curious animal detour, this superior cli-fi tale often feels like tomorrow’s headlines.
As the regional sheriff of his district in a flooded, half-ruined Ireland of the future, a climate change survivor becomes a hero, wanted killer, and key figure in the struggles to control the island chain.
In this cli-fi sequel, public policy and fiction author Brennan offers a continuation of the world he created in his previous novel, Iceapelago (2020): a Northern Hemisphere altered by drastic climate change in the latter part of the 21st century. The “Eriador event,” an apocalyptic icefall tsunami originating in a collapsing Greenland, effectively shut off the Gulf Stream, ushering in fierce winters that lasted half a year. Three decades later, only Canada seems to have withstood the worst of the calamity. The country has the advantage of hosting stranded Irish scientist/inventor Sean Pitcher, who foresaw what was coming. The Eastern United States is devastated (“Those with guns are in charge”); continental Europe is mostly drowned; and survivors struggle on bits of England and Wales jutting out of the sea. Ireland has become an island chain—the titular “iceapelago”—that still functions, but cooperation and planning among scattered communities, such as Cork, Howth, and Sligo, are essential, sustaining 13,250 people through the cold. Unfortunately, administration is lacking. A nameless central “Commander” in Dublin is more concerned about threats to his power from the regional governments led by “Sixes” and their law enforcer “Sheriffs” than guaranteeing food stocks and maintaining crucial flying delivery drones as winter approaches. At Malahide Castle Island, loner Rory, who lost his family in the Eriador event, is impressive enough with guns to land the Sheriff job after his predecessor gets caught stealing supplies. When a devastating storm strikes and Rory kills the Commander’s daughter-in-law, Jane Madden, a bureaucrat who tried to deny his people sanctuary, the new Malahide Sheriff becomes a wanted fugitive, protected by some as a hero, scorned by others as a murderous outlaw. Meanwhile, outside invaders plot against the iceapelago and its tempting resources. At this crucial juncture, the long-absent Pitcher fatefully reappears.
While the kitsch-culture legacy of plentiful 1970s disaster movies and their attendant books still tends to set readers’ teeth on edge, Brennan’s cli-fi prophecy transcends the Irwin Allen aesthetic. The story offers impressive worldbuilding and fairly persuasive ideas of what is required to persevere in dire straits like these—especially when massive casualties leave remnants in high office who are clearly not society’s best and brightest. Even Rory is a problematic protagonist, a hard fellow closer in spirit to vintage Clint Eastwood than to Liam Neeson in his impulses toward unthinking violence and retribution. But in the most audacious gambit, the author shifts the point of view away from the human element altogether, telling the story in part via tribes of Arctic foxes, newly arrived and opportunistic in the face of humans’ decline. Working in peaceful accord with another species (puffin birds) throughout the winter, the four-footed predators seem to harbor more noble qualities of foresight, pragmatism, and even spirituality than do the fragments of Homo sapiens. That said, the fox subplot payoff is rather weak here unless Brennan has future installments on ice.
Despite a curious animal detour, this superior cli-fi tale often feels like tomorrow’s headlines.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-8380639-2-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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