Denial is not a river in Egypt

As we head towards probable stalemate at Copenhagen next month, it seems important to ask ourselves why we can't find the political will to save ourselves. One of the reasons, it seems to me, is that those countries which are hindering progress - chiefly Canada and the USA, where Republicans are acting disgracefully as usual - have the lowest levels of public understanding of the climate crisis. In the States especially, a recent opinion poll showed a steep decline in the number of people who believe that human behaviour is causing abrupt climate change.

This confusion about the science has been created, as a matter of policy, by vested interests in Big Carbon that want to stall all efforts to change course. They have been ably abetted by ideologues on the hard right (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and in the UK such scientific luminaries as Melanie Phillips, Nigel and Dominic Lawson, the repulsive Christopher Monckton and any number of half mad bloggers for the Daily Telegraph), who are in turn given a wealthy and pervasive media platform to spread their disinformation and pseudoscience. In the USA, I'm thinking especially of Fox News as well as the Wall Street Journal and countless radio stations. In the UK, nearly all the rightwing newspapers and tabloids take editorially 'sceptical' lines: not surprising when you consider that Paul Dacre, editor of The Daily Mail, the Barclay brothers who own The Telegraph, Rupert Murdoch who owns The Sun and the pornographer Richard Desmond who owns The Express, are all of them ideologues with a reactionary agenda. One has only to google the words 'global warming' to find a vast array of websites intent on denying reality, or bamboozling readers with scientific research that curiously lacks any of the peer-reviewing that is a basic prerequisite of responsible scientific research. Well you might say, gadflies and contrarians have always been with us. Alas, the denialists matter because they are most effective at muddying the waters on the greatest threat facing humanity - and the consequence is that politicians, never the most courageous lot, are thoroughly lacking the moral courage to act in our children's interests.

All of which is by way of a preambling plug for my article on the website of Prospect Magazine. In March I found myself in St Andrews debating three of the more vicious climate change denialists in the UK. It wasn't an edifying experience; but it's necessary work, and you can read more about it here. Or even join in with a comment: I will attempt to respond to all serious posts on this most vital of topics.

Here comes the flood

My short story, ‘The Fortress at Bruges’, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 4th November at 15.30. The story, commissioned by Emma Harding, is read by the distinguished young actor (I can write ‘young’ because he’s three years my junior) Stephen Cambell Moore.

‘The Fortress at Bruges’ is set in a Flanders of the future: perhaps a century from now. Although it imagines a city on the edge of a risen sea – a museum piece in the globally warmed world our elected leaders seem incapable of averting – it is not concerned so much with depicting that world as investigating what living there might do to people emotionally. As the world alters out of recognition (as is already starting to happen in Australia), how will we respond psychologically to becoming foreigners in our own land? And won’t our ancient human impulses to find love and material prosperity come to seem, well, petty in comparison to what we have done?

On the scenario front, ‘The Fortress at Bruges’ is based on solid predictive science; it is harrowingly conceivable. Large swathes of Belgium and the Netherlands (not to mention western England) lie close to sea level, so that a sea-level rise of two metres would leave millions of hectares under water. Google has a useful, if rough-and-ready, simulator. This picture demonstrates the high risk of permanent land loss due to rising and expanding seas. Large parts of Holland (the bits under the broken white line) are currently below sea level, kept dry by an elaborate system of dykes and flood defences. The cost, however, of building ever higher and more resistant defences will most likely become prohibitive. One of the responses, already in practice in the UK and elsewhere, is managed retreat. There are good summaries on this process here and here. Unfortunately, while managed retreat has economic and wildlife benefits under the present, relatively slow, rate of sea-level rise, if as seems more and more likely the ice shelves of Greenland and – heaven forbid – Antarctica undergo substantial melting, managed retreat may become a full-scale evacuation. I’m thinking for analogy of 'the miracle of Dunkirk' – the site of which, in such a scenario, will go the same way as the land around Bruges.

Blogging the future

As our society hurtles helter-skelter towards a pretty unpleasant future – droughts, floods, resource wars, the unstoppable rise of Simon Cowell – the need grows ever more urgent for artists and storytellers to engage with our crises, both to reflect them and to think up alternative models of behaviour which might, by our imagining them, have a chance of coming into being. In my own small way, I am trying to contribute to this cultural adjustment by writing stories and novels that engage directly with the coming upheavals. If this sounds grandiose to you, I’d be the first to agree; but we all have a part to play in getting to grips with the new reality we are creating, and there is a growing movement – as varied and disparate as the world itself – of writers and artists engaged in that process. The internet is, of course, the forum where the ferment is taking place. Over the coming year, it is my intention to write about a different blog each month. For October, I would like to draw attention to spring coppice, the blog of a friend of mine, Abbie Garrington, who as well as being an intrepid explorer of uncomfortable tropical places is devoting her academic research to ‘twentieth century and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in nature writing, environmental protest fiction and literary representations of climate change’. As well as posting well and interestingly on a host of topics, she has the merit of doing so far more frequently than I do. Please visit Abbie’s blog; and while you’re there, check out her links. You’ll get no work done for hours.

Free readings at the Edinburgh Festival

Last year was the wettest, most sodden festival in history: a sort of end-times carnival of the arts. 2009 looks set to be rather more clement and already the usual tents are up in the Meadows, my girlfriend has been presented with her first flyer and a giant purple cow has been tipped over on Bristo Square. Yup, it's that time of year when Edinburgh's population doubles, enterprising citizens rent out their flats to amateur dramatic companies dreaming of glory for their cabaret version of King Lear, and I spend more money than is sensible on all sorts of edifying - and some not so edifying - events.

Last year I had a new novel to sell, which took me to the Edinburgh Book Festival proper. This year I haven't got a new book but that hasn't stopped me securing a few reading 'gigs' - which brings me to the purpose of this post. If you're around and able to make it to any of the following events, do give them a try. Each one is absolutely FREE!


WEST PORT BOOK FESTIVAL

I'll be reading with my friend, the very excellent poet and novelist Mike Stocks, at Edinburgh Books on Thursday 13 August at 7.30 pm. Poems, stories, polemic (maybe) and drama all in one, watched over by Clarence.

EDINBURGH BOOK FRINGE, WORD POWER BOOKS

Edinburgh's (still, just) only independent bookshop, the invaluable Word Power Books, will be hosting me and the dauntingly brilliant Alan Bissett on Tuesday 18 August at 2.30 pm. Come and see Alan perform excerpts from his new novel, Death of a Ladies' Man. I can't think of a novelist more skilled at interpreting his own work. You'd be a fool to skip this. As indeed would I.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL

There will be two opportunities to hear me read my short stories this year in Charlotte Square. Both events are scheduled for Monday 24 August.

At 10 am I will be reading at the Writers Retreat. This is a short, 10-minute taster to set you up for the day.

At 4 pm I will be performing in the Festival Bookshop.

Do come along to any of these events. There will be chat, drinks (in some instances) and opportunities to order my forthcoming short story collection .

Utz: a play on BBC Radio 4

One of my very first paid jobs as a writer was in radio. It was an adaptation of E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops , which was broadcast on BBC Radio Four in April 2001. I loved the experience, especially the studio recording: a sort of time-limited, by-the-seat-of-our pants collective endeavour. I hoped to get other commissions, but subsequent pitches for radio plays were turned down by the BBC and, when I got my first novel published, I decided to concentrate on fiction. Then, in 2007, I bumped into the play's producer, the delightful Marilyn Imrie, at the Edinburgh Book Festival. She suggested that I send her some new pitches; which I did. One of these was for a dramatisation of Bruce Chatwin's last novel, Utz. The BBC is a sucker for anniversaries and 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of Chatwin's too-early death. This, and the Communist context of the Prague-set narrative (it's twenty years, too, since the Velvet Revolution; something Chatwin did not live to see) helped secure a green light for the proposal.

You can hear the end result on BBC Radio 4 this Saturday at 14.30.

The play features Jack Klaff as Utz, Sam Kelly as Orlik, Daniel Weyman as the narrator and Pam Ferris as Marta. Oh, and I make an appearance as a plummy Oxford don. Can't think how I ended up with that role...

Books go SPLAT

An exciting and impressive venture, this:

Celebrating its 7th anniversary in 2009, the Warwick SPLAT Festival, is a non-profit annual week-long celebration of Student Performance, Literature, Art and Theatre. Since its inception in 2003, it has brought together diverse and creative individuals who have created the first and largest student run arts festival in the world.

I am chuffed to have been invited to read and speak at SPLAT this year. As there will be creative writing students in the audience, I think I could most helpfully spend my time warning them about the BLOODY HORRIBLE MESS that publishing has become in the UK.

Squeezed by profit margins, the evaporation of books coverage in newspapers, the desperate plight of independent bookshops and the recession, a culture of paralysis seems to have overtaken publishing houses (they weren't exactly dynamic in the first place). And writers like me probably shouldn't complain too loudly, as any number of publicists called Tarquin and marketing assistants called Cressida have lost their jobs in recent months. In fact, the only people who seem to be flourishing in the book world for the moment are celebrity ghostwriters.

Great days for Jordan, terrible times for people who actually read.

Still, periods of transition are always painful, and the ubiquity of readers' blogs and book groups testifies to a continued enthusiasm for good writing. The model is still vague in my mind, but something akin to the organic movement and the growing concern for locally-sourced produce is going to have to emerge in literary culture. The flog-em cheap supermarkets and promotion-stuffed book chains will continue to kill off diversity unless readers become aware of their power as 'consumers' to affect publishing for the better.

This country needs a 'farmer's market' approach to book-selling: bringing readers and writers together, so the latter can sell their wares without distortion. At the same time, a national campaign to support our local, independent book shops, which are capable of catering to the specific tastes of their communities, is sorely needed. In short, the greening of food culture may offer a blueprint for a healthier publishing industry. We have to do something; because as things stand I don't have high hopes for the future of Warwick's young writers.

I'm gonna git you Succour

Times are hard for writers, as they are for just about everybody, and short stories are especially hard to sell. Most publishers won't even touch a collection, while the number of publications interested in quality short fiction seems to dwindle year on year. Succour Magazine is boldly holding out against the tide. One of my stories, 'Kutb', appears in the latest edition: 'Fantasies'. You can buy your copy here.

Victorian Verb

On Friday 8th May, I will be joining Barnsley’s finest, Ian McMillan, on a Victorian-themed episode of Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. My contribution to the programme, ‘The Chronic Omnibus’, is a tribute to (and possibly a pastiche of) early science fiction, or scientific romance, as the young H.G. Wells liked to call it. I will be acting opposite Ewan Bailey and sitting around a table with Toby Litt and Ergo Phizmiz. Tune in for a night of gruesome poetry, music hall banter and the deep weirdness that is ‘point balling’.