Bear Season

I've been writing this newsletter less frequently of late because I've been preoccupied with other matters, including but not limited to, work, the endless Canadian summer vacation, and a residency up in the Rockies. On my last day in the mountains a shiny black bear wandered out of the woods and looked me up and down. I looked back at the bear, tried to block any recall of Werner Herzog's voiceover in the final moments of Grizzly Man (2005): "I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears." We looked at each other for a little longer, and I was the one to walk off first, feigning indifference, and desperate to tell a human that I had finally seen, and been seen by, a bear. I've since read Marian Engel's completely feral 1974 novel Bear, about an archivist tasked with cataloguing the books in a remote house in northern Ontario, whose lassitude is shattered by an affair with a bear. It's extremely funny and quite deranging, and maybe a rebuke both to Herzog and Timothy Treadwell, the man at the heart of Grizzly Man, in its fantasies and projections about bear life. Treadwell loves the bears. Lou, Engel's archivist, loves just one bear, and she really, really loves that bear. (This CBC backgrounder is a useful cribsheet on the novel and its reception and also has examples of some amazing cover art.)

Weirdness is a quality that Bear shares with Romy Ash's new novel, Mantle, which I reviewed for ABR this month, less in the Weird Fiction or gothic sense, and more in the way things get very loose in these novels. (Incidentally, Ash's protagonist is named Ursula. The novel is set in Tasmania, where there are no bears, and I didn't follow the bear trail in my review –– but thinking of Ursula as a bear foregrounds her sensuality, the way embodied experience shapes her understanding of the world. She wants to taste everything.) Mantle is a pandemic novel that turns into a climate novel, a grief novel, a quest, a romance, a horror story, a mushroom novel. (There's even a nod to the other mushroom books on the market, you know the ones.) I howled with surprise and laughter and shock at the scenes of Ursula trimming mushrooms from her belly and cooking them up for dinner, just as I howled at the sex scenes in Bear. They woke me up. Here's some of what I wrote about Mantle for ABR:

Mantle is an antidote to the toxic proliferation of literary slop. When we talk about AI hallucination, what we really mean is that a platform has generated answers that are incorrect, that it has made up quotes, citations, dates, and the like. When we say that large language models cough up weird metaphors, what we really mean is that they’re nonsensical.

The hallucinatory quality to Mantle, the weirdness of Ash’s metaphors, have a different provenance and consequence. There’s a lucidity to Mantle’s strangeness that at once reflects and eases the awful, disorienting strangeness of living through a historical moment of such loss and folly. Ash’s metaphors and mushrooms offer an incitement to be daring in our sense-making, to experiment with new ways of conceptualising the world. Mantle’s great strength is its willingness to let meaning and affect flourish like so many mushrooms – to be weird, and to be complex...

Reading Mantle, we bear witness to the work of radical imagination. This kind of creative labour reconfigures the way that we know the world and renews our deep connection to nature, and to each other. It is a novel that joyfully affirms the intelligence, the vitality, and, above all, the interdependence of myriad forms of life.

It's been a season of climate novels laced with grief for me. I wrote about Ilka Tampke's How to Love the World for Guardian Australia, which is a thematically and formally very ambitious novel about how to reconcile beauty and trauma, about how to live with –– all this. I don't think How To Love The World is an entirely successful book, but I would nonetheless recommend it to anyone who is drawn to thinking about the decolonial ecofeminist questions that run through it.

It’s a lot to ask of a reader, to spend several hundred pages with a suffering woman trapped under a log as she tries to figure out her life and hopefully get saved. Nellika’s diligence, her realisations and revisions, her effortfulness overwhelmed and sometimes bored me.

But I talked a great deal about How to Love the World with the people around me as I tried to organise my thoughts about it. This is a sign of a novel that has left a mark. Mainly I talked about how much I wanted to love a novel that is fearless in its efforts to conceptualise a decolonial phenomenology of place, and willing to centre a protagonist who is not only wounded but has inflicted wounds on the people around her.

Maria Takolander's debut The End of Romance, which I also wrote about for Guardian Australia, is located in a more distant future, after every climate tipping point has been exceeded. No solastalgia here, just tattered Disney storybooks with pictures of wild creatures. Counter the storybooks, this is a novel of unremitting disenchantment. If I'd had more space in the review, I would have spent time thinking about the inflections of romance in the novel, which I found smart and beguiling. Romance, as in the sex and love version, is done with; this is a society that reproduces itself through rape. There's a travestied knight on a quest, the remnants of chivalry in tatters; similarly, the tropes linking the Romantic individual to Nature are in rough shape. I admired this flinty novel a great deal!

Not every reader will revel in the unstinting bleakness of The End of Romance. This novel offers nothing in the way of comic relief or palliative sentimentality. I take Takolander’s refusal to re-enchant the degraded world of her novel as a sign of her intellectual seriousness. Amitav Ghosh disparaged culture-makers for trafficking in “modes of concealment”, fictions that evade the terrible realities of the climate crisis. As we live through season after season of unprecedented weather, of warming oceans, melting ice, heatwaves, bushfires, freak storms, and as we continue to burn fossil fuels and consume more crap and dump it into unseen places, The End of Romance is a bracing rebuke to climate denialism and fantasies of easy adaptation.

And finally, I wrote a long piece for Guardian Australia about Australian publishing that for many months had the working title, Too Many Books. This feature emerged out of conversations I've been having for years about the volume of new Australian books that appear (high), the quality of those books (variable), and the relationship between volume and quality. I think I've received more emails from friends and strangers about this piece than any I've written previously. I heard from readers overwhelmed by market choice and disappointed by the books they were reading, and I heard from a ton of authors who'd had middling to highly stressful experiences when their books went to market. I appreciated Nathan Hollier's response in Books and Publishing, and also the chance to speak to Hilary Harper on RN about some of the issues raised in the piece. (You can listen to the segment here.)

I'm currently working at a glacial pace on a larger project on books and value, and the cultural, labour and environmental consequences of living with so many books, with too many books, so it's been energising to participate in a robust conversation about books and value, and about the obvious and more nuanced conflicts between market value and critical value. To this end, I'm returning to the mountains next week with a stack of books to read, and will be driving through those parts of northern British Columbia where the forestry industry holds sway. What I didn't write about in my Guardian piece was the resources dimension of our publishing culture. None of the books we read are made of 100% recycled paper stock, so the great tracts of plantation forests west of the Rockies (and everywhere else) are also part of the story of too many books. And also, there are bears there.