Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

ISSN: 0011-1619 (Print) 1939-9138 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20

Flooded Futures: The Representation of the

Anthropocene in Twenty-First-Century British
Flood Fictions

Astrid Bracke

To cite this article: Astrid Bracke (2019) Flooded Futures: The Representation of the
Anthropocene in Twenty-First-Century British Flood Fictions, Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction, 60:3, 278-288, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2019.1570911

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1570911

Published online: 06 Feb 2019.

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CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
2019, VOL. 60, NO. 3, 278–288
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2019.1570911

Flooded Futures: The Representation of the Anthropocene in

Twenty-First-Century British Flood Fictions
Astrid Bracke
Department of English, HAN University of Applied Sciences Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article presents a subset of twenty-first-century British novels and Contemporary British fiction;
defines them as flood fictions. Through their depiction of climate crisis Climate change
floods, novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Clare
Morrall’s When the Floods Came, and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army con-
stitute a major imaginative response to climate change.
Flood fictions as I define them are characterized by two features: first,
the depiction of floods as an effect of and synecdoche for climate crisis,
making use in particular of the historical and visual connotations of floods;
and, second, the depiction of the literal submersion of the narratives
themselves by means of language erosion and narrative fragmentation. As
such, flood fictions tackle some of the imaginative and representative
challenges posed by the Anthropocene. My reading of these novels pro-
vides an intervention in current debates on imagining and narrating climate
crisis and presents a previously unexplored and underexplored subset of
literary works.

The unnamed narrator of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) gets disturbing news weeks
before giving birth to her son: “the water is rising faster than they thought. It is creeping faster.
A calculation error. A badly plotted movie, sensors out at sea” (3). The waters are rising, creeping
toward London—and while she is in hospital, the really bad news comes. London, it seems, has been lost
to the water: “An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping
forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children. Ours” (8). Hunter’s novel is
one of a number of twenty-first-century British novels that depict floods as a consequence of climate
crisis. Contemporary culture is characterized by widespread awareness of climate change.1 This aware-
ness has translated into the growing popularity of climate fictions: genre and literary fictions in which
climate change causes political, socioeconomic, and cultural crises.2 Especially since 2011, “there has
been an actual increase in literary engagements with climate change” (Johns-Putra 1).
In this article, I focus on what I call “flood fictions” as a subset of climate fiction. These novels use
floods as a literal consequence of climate crisis, but also as a symbolic image for life in the
Anthropocene: unpredictable, overwhelming, and engulfing. At the same time, flood fictions them-
selves are engulfed by climate crisis as under the pressure of floods, the very language that makes up
their narrative falls apart. In what follows I will further define flood fictions, focusing especially on
British examples. I will show how these works use flooding to tackle some of the representational
and imaginative challenges of describing the Anthropocene, in terms of novelistic content as well as
form. As such, my reading interjects in current debates on the possibilities and impossibilities that
novels provide in representing the Anthropocene.
Symbolic and literal floods recur in the climate crisis imagination. Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016
documentary Before the Flood uses the image of the flood as an environmental tipping point after

CONTACT Astrid Bracke mail@astridbracke.com HAN University of Applied Sciences, Heidevenstraat 16, 6533 TR
Nijmegen, Netherlands.
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 279

which catastrophic climate crisis can no longer be halted. A symbolic flood is also depicted in the
2017 film Downsizing. When methane levels in the atmosphere reach dangerous heights, a group of
idealistic environmentalists descends into a cave under the earth’s surface, in an attempt to wait out
the extinction of the human species. The cave, the film’s protagonist realizes, functions as a kind of
Noah’s Ark. A similar extinction event is referred to as the “waterless flood” in Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013; Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam), in which
a scientist creates a deadly virus that wipes out a considerable part of humanity. Likewise, the deadly
flu killing off most of humankind in Station Eleven (St. John Mandel, 2014) is framed as a flood,
highlighting the symbolic force that flooding holds.
Literal floods also abound in the contemporary literary imagination. In Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne
(2017), the main character is a climate refugee whose home—an unnamed island—is lost to rising
seas. At the end of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), the protagonist listens to news of
disaster and flooding in Japan, only to discover that her own house is about to flood as well.
A hurricane ravages New York in Nathanial Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), much as the
Bangladeshi delta in The Hungry Tide (Ghosh 2004) is about to be swept away. For disaster films,
floods provide a welcome imagery of crisis and change, from the flooded planet in Waterworld
(1995) to the flooding of Manhattan, leaving only the Statue of Liberty standing, in The Day After
Tomorrow (2004), and the breaching of the Thames Barrier in the 2007 British film Flood.
Sensationalist though these films may be, flooding is a very real consequence of climate crisis.
Global warming is linked to increased flooding in most European countries, as well as in other
regions around the world (Alfieri et al.). In Britain, changing environmental and climatological
circumstances will make floods twenty times more likely by 2080, affecting at least twice as many
people than are currently at risk from flooding. While it is notoriously difficult to relate individual
events to climate change, attribution studies increasingly show direct links between anthropogenic
climate change and extreme weather events such as heat waves, hurricanes, and floods.3 A large-scale
2016 study showed that the extreme precipitation, flooding, and storm surges in southern England
and Wales in the winter of 2013–2014 can be linked to environmental change. As Nathalie Schaller
et al. argue, “as well as increasing the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold, anthropogenic
warming caused a small but significant increase in the number of January days with westerly flow,
both of which increased extreme precipitation” (627). This “small but significant increase” led to
451 million pounds of insured losses in southern England. Little wonder, then, that many twenty-
first-century fictions imagine a very wet future, especially for Britain. However, to date little explicit
attention has been paid to this particular subset of novels, and to how these fictions constitute
a unique engagement with the Anthropocene.4
In what follows, my focus will be on twenty-first-century British flood fictions, especially Hunter’s The
End We Start From, Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), and When the Floods Came (2016) by Clare
Morrall. Other examples of flood fictions include Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Sam Taylor’s The
Island at the End of the World (2009), Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship (2015), and Natasha Carthew’s All
Rivers Run Free (2018). The floods that these novels depict are major destabilizing events, leading to and
coinciding with the large-scale collapse of societal, political, and economic structures. Contemporary
flood fictions draw on an older, specifically British tradition of flood novels, including Richard Jefferies’
After London (1885), John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), and J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned
World (1962), as well as flood fictions from all over the world, ranging from the epic of Gilgamesh to the
Bible.5 As I define them, twenty-first-century flood fictions display two main characteristics. First, they
depict climate crisis by means of floods—or, to put it differently, floods are one of the major ways in
which the effects of climate crisis are manifested in the novels. In their depiction of floods as the result of
—even synecdoches for—climate crisis, these works go some way toward tackling the imaginative and
representational challenges of the Anthropocene frequently noted by scholars. Second, flood fictions
metafictionally internalize the effects of climate crisis floods through narrative fragmentation and
language erosion, showing the break-up of narration due to climate change. This break-up points to
the way in which these novels test and expand the boundaries of the novel as a form.
280 A. BRACKE

Floods as Climate Crisis Spaces

The Anthropocene, Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke argue, “asks that we think and
imagine on a wholly different scale, vastly more global in scope, vastly more historical in extent, in
the course of making decisions about countless matters of environmental concern” (Garrard,
Handwerk and Wilke 150). Climate change poses a “serious representational challenge” (13), in
Elizabeth Callaway’s words—so challenging, in fact, that climate crisis, as Timothy Clark puts it, may
resist being conceptualized (Introduction 10). It is not only the temporal and spatial scale that makes
climate crisis and the Anthropocene difficult to capture imaginatively. Their effects are “difficult to
see or describe, because they are not interesting or dramatic or, more generally, because they are at
odds with basic categories like emotion, narrative, or even language” (Bond, De Bruyn, and Rapson
857). Consequently, a number of critics argue that traditional forms of narrative may be unsuited to
representing climate crisis. Timothy Clark, for instance, suggests that the Anthropocene “enacts the
demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time” than typically offered by
narratives (Ecocriticism 13). In a similar vein, Ursula Heise, Timothy Morton, and scholars in the
digital humanities advocate for different kinds of narratives than novels and other traditional forms
to capture climate crisis. Their suggestions range from installation art to Google Maps and the
database.6 While these critics tend to interpret the imaginative and representative challenges posed
by the Anthropocene as a reason to look beyond the novel, a different group of scholars—myself
included—explores the tension between an event that is often deemed unnarratable—climate crisis—
on the one hand, and the possibilities offered by the contemporary novel, on the other hand. The
work of these critics highlights how, as Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw argue, “the pessimistic turn
of literary (eco)criticism seems at odds not only with the increasing production of climate change
literature itself but also with the expansion of a concomitant critical field” (1). Novels may present
a particularly productive space in which to imagine and think through climate crisis, and especially
what it means to live it. As such, as Adam Trexler puts it, “[t]he imaginative capacities of the novel
have made it a vital site for the articulation of the Anthropocene” (Trexler 23).7 In his discussion of
early climate fiction, Jesse Oak Taylor emphasizes that fiction offers “the simulation of hypothetical
possibility within the actual world, akin to the computer models that simulate possible futures based
on historical data” (108). Novels in particular provide—simulate—emotional experiences that enable
the reader to emphatically respond to textual, fictional worlds. It is against the background of the
possibilities offered by the novel as form in a time of climate crisis that I explore flood fictions. These
works, I will show, function as essential imaginative tools to imagine—even begin to feel—what it is
like to live in the Anthropocene.
As described earlier, Hunter’s The End We Start From depicts a massive flood that inundates
London and large parts of southern England. The unnamed narrator flees to the North with her
partner and newborn son as the flood leads to a civil war in which both of her partner’s parents are
killed. When her partner disappears as well, the narrator travels further north to a refugee camp in
Scotland, and then on to an island off the coast. While there is no explicit mention of the words
“climate change” or “climate crisis” in The End We Start From, the narrator’s reference to predicted
flooding—“the water is rising faster than they thought” (3)—places it firmly within contemporary
environmental discourses. Both When the Floods Came and The Carhullan Army are set in a time
some years, even decades, after massive floods first strike. In When the Floods Came, anti-pollution
laws passed during the narrator’s mother’s youth led to the collapse of the tourism industry, which
ruined the British economy. A poorly handled outbreak of a contagious disease subsequently led to
a decimation of the population. Large parts of the country are lost to floods. Britain has become
dependent on the Americans and the Chinese—much as in Hall’s novel, where food is imported
from the United States. The Carhullan Army shows environmental, political, economic, and societal
collapse—what Iain Robinson describes as “a regression from present circumstances, occurring as
a result of contemporary society’s failures in managing its resources and stemming climate change”
(198). The swelling and flooding of the river Eden in the novel echoes the floods at the beginning of
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 281

the twenty-first century that inspired Hall to write the novel, when she realized that the implications
of climate change were no longer imagined, but visible (Hall, “Survivor’s Tale”).
Flood fictions such as The End We Start From, When the Floods Came, and The Carhullan Army
go some way toward tackling the imaginative and representational challenges of the Anthropocene in
ways often overlooked in existing debates on climate fiction. For instance, both the constricted space
offered by the contemporary novel as a genre as well as the physically constricted space of the
flooded landscape offer a stage on which many of the global issues of climate change are played out.
Matters of inequality, privilege, and survival are foregrounded through the narrative perspective of
characters who are survivors, rather than victims of climate crisis. Narrative perspective and
focalization moreover allow readers to empathize with characters and to feel along with them.8
Finally, as I explore in more depth below, flood fictions use the historical and visual connotations of
floods to show catastrophic climate change.
While the kinds of floods predicted as a result of climate crisis are unprecedented, floods
themselves are not. To most Western readers—including in Britain—floods are immediate and
recognizable, if not from personal experience, then from older stories, myths, and historical events.
Hence, while many other effects of climate crisis are hard to imagine, or even hard to see, floods are
not: they “are the most common disasters known to humankind” (Dobraszczyk 871). Because of this
long history and familiarity, floods provide a convenient shorthand for climate crisis. As Trexler
suggests in his brief exploration of floods, “[w]e simply do not know how to think about methane,
ocean acidification, and biodiversity, but twentieth-century reinterpretations of Genesis were pop-
ular before greenhouse gases were a matter of public concern” (83). Importantly, increased flooding
shows that climate crisis is happening now and is not just something of the future.9 In climate crisis
floods, immediacy and visibility are furthermore combined with a long history of flood stories.
Andrew Tate notes that “300 accounts of great deluge exist in different cultures. The Noah narrative
is preceded by stories from Mesopotamia including the epic of Gilgamesh; it also finds parallels in
Greek mythology in a story told by Plato of a man named Deucalion who, with help from
Prometheus, builds an ark to escape a flood sent by Zeus” (Tate 27). As such, our imaginations of
climate crisis floods are shaped by older stories that determine not only what we think flooding will
look like, but also what the causes are, who is to blame, and who gets to survive. The End We Start
From makes the connection to older stories explicit. Once the narrator’s baby is born, she and her
partner contemplate calling him Noah, but they decide against it, as “we heard it rustling between
the curtains. A popular choice” (9) for a child born as a massive flood hits London. Her narrative is
interspersed with passages in italics, reminiscent of creation myths. The first passage reads: “At first
there was only the sea, only the sky. From the sky came a rock, which dropped deep into the sea.
A thick slime covered the rock, and from this slime words grew” (2). A few chapters on, once the
narrator and her partner have traveled north from London to stay with his parents, a section is
inserted that makes obvious reference to flooding: “In the ancient times the ocean rose until it covered
everything in sight. It covered the trees and the beasts and even the mountains, and ice drifted over
their tops” (17). Hunter notes in the acknowledgments to the book that these passages were inspired
by numerous mythological and religious texts from around the world, tying a twenty-first-century
story in with a long history of myths.
Flood fictions succeed in depicting the Anthropocene so successfully—perhaps more so than
some other kinds of climate fiction—because they tap into a wider visual iconography in which the
flooded landscape holds particular power. Indeed, I would argue that especially the flooded land-
scape, in which structures and objects are half revealed and half gone, is a powerful image for the
Anthropocene. Although the flood that submerges London in The End We Start From is unprece-
dented, the image of London covered by water is not. Scenes of urban flooding and destruction are
familiar to many readers who have seen disaster films and documentaries such as Life After People
(2008–10). The visual language that these kinds of stories depend on in their representation of the
future often relies on the destruction of familiar or iconic landmarks. In many American films, the
destruction of the Statue of Liberty is an irresistible symbol of the world as we know it coming to an
282 A. BRACKE

end. In the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, for instance, it pokes out of the huge snowdrifts that
have frozen the northern hemisphere, shortly after the Hollywood sign is destroyed by tornadoes. In
his discussion of Life After People, Garrard notes that the Eiffel Tower is a similarly iconic structure.
He suggests that in these kinds of documentaries “its universal recognition as a symbol of a country
that seems ancient combines with the possibilities for destroying it with special effects in true
disaster movie style, making it an ideal motif for human engineering succumbing to time and
oxidation” (52). In the 2007 British production Flood, a sudden radical change in weather patterns
causes a flood that breaches the Thames Flood Barrier. If that barrier is destroyed, large parts of
London—including Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament—will be flooded. In the British imagina-
tion this scenario arguably holds as much power as the Statue of Liberty does in the American
imagination. Sister, the narrator in The Carhullan Army, recalls that “the Thames flood barrier had
been overwhelmed and tidal water had filled the building”—the houses of Parliament (loc. 1465)—
causing the destruction of the British political system. Such scenes in which iconic structures are
destroyed depict what I call future ruins: landscapes and objects that are part of our present but that
are ruined in the future and, as such, become the ruins of our contemporary society. Future ruins are
narrative devices through which flood fictions show the vast spatial aspects of the destruction of
climate crisis on a smaller scale. Roza’s world in When the Floods Came is filled with such structures,
from the slowly eroding barriers constructed around Birmingham’s city center to the massive
defunct wind turbines that dot the landscape. On their journey to a fair, the family encounters
a future ruin:

We pass a fallen wind turbine at the edge of a motorway, a monster felled by the forces of nature it was meant
to harness. It was originally part of an arc that should have swept out to the horizon in an elegant, unbroken
wave, but is now little more than a line of broken teeth, an uneven parade, full of gaps. Some have been severed
at the top, just below the blades, others at the base, all victims of an orgy of winter destruction. Only a handful
remain intact, vast follies that watch over the land, like sentinels, waiting patiently for the men with repair kits
who will never come. (131)

When she gets closer, the description of the turbine becomes almost animistic: “The innards have
burst out and spilt across the ground, a generator that no longer generates, a bloodless mechanism
that failed in the final battle” (131). The turbines are remnants of the past, but particularly also of the
attempts at sustainable energy—in our time, in Roza’s past—that were not enough to prevent further
climate crisis.
While the violent destruction of the familiar world is especially apt in our current moment, the
particular kinds of future ruin depicted by twenty-first-century flood fictions are hardly unique to
contemporary visual culture. In his romance After London, Jefferies celebrates the flooding of London
—which is now covered with a noxious swamp. As the narrator puts it, “[f]or all this marvellous city, of
which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and
shrubs sprung up, and, lastly the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown”
(Jefferies). Flood fictions, just like disaster films, take much of their impact from depicting the future
ruins our contemporary world has turned into. Hunter’s The End We Start From, for example, is partly
set in a London submerged by floods. London has been flooded in When the Floods Came as well,
requiring the government seat to be moved to Brighton.10 The focus on such “landmark cities”
(Dobraszczyk) may be explained by the novels’ audience, for whom the destruction of a familiar and
important site holds much more significance than a similar fate befalling an unfamiliar or geographically
remote location. This effect is heightened by the use of historical footage of floods in many disaster films,
including The Day After Tomorrow and Flood. Nonetheless, as Paul Dobraszczyk notes, cinematic
depictions may be problematic, as many viewers will consider them purely fictional. Despite recent
massive floods in such landmark cities as New York (2012) and Paris (2018), the representation of these
cities in film and other media expresses a sense that “the threats that climate change pose to the affluent
West are still at bay—a future possibility rather than a clear and present risk” (869). More problemati-
cally, the representation of iconic sites and landmark cities obscures the fact that “even more peripheral
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 283

and impoverished cities will likely be the first to be affected by rising sea levels and more severe and
frequent flooding” (Dobraszczyk 869). A striking dynamic, then, seems to be at work whenever landmark
cities and iconic structures turn into future ruins. These depictions combine the familiarity of floods on
the one hand with a reassuring sense of fictionality on the other. The force of future ruins lies in the
familiar made weird, a result of a place’s “resonance,” as Andrew Milner proposes (835). “Resonance,”
Stephen Greenblatt’s term, refers to an object’s power to evoke “the complex, dynamic cultural forces
from which it has emerged” (42). While resonance is not always necessarily linked to destruction—as in
Greenblatt’s example of artifacts left behind by Jewish communities during the Holocaust—the key is, as
he puts it, that the object intimates “a larger community of voices and skills, an imagined ethnographic
thickness” (48). Future ruins have such a powerful effect in flood fictions because they show both
destruction and survival, all the while referring back to the culture from which the buildings and objects
emerge—a culture that is frequently our own.
While some of the most iconic examples of future ruins in flood fictions are affected monuments
and technological structures, among the most moving examples are abandoned houses. Roza—the
narrator—and her family are the only ones still living in their apartment building. Every so often,
they will enter the other apartments to look for spare parts for their devices, or just to explore. The
flats are still full of furniture, full of most, if not all, of the belongings of their former inhabitants. As
such, they are symbols of the past, their contents never collected by either the owners or their
descendants because, in Roza’s words, there is “no one left with an interest in the generation that had
failed the country” (43). The narrator in The End We Start From encounters several future ruins
when she returns to London as the flood waters recede. The first ruin is London itself. Her
description overlays the stories generally associated with London with a new, post-flood reality:
“Where I envisage welcomes and tea, smiles and Blitz spirit, there is grey concrete, wailing people
dragging themselves across the road, photo-boards of the missing” (102). She notices “new high-
water marks” left by the flood water, and to her surprise realizes that “bullet holes in buildings,”
remainders of the civil war, are “so much like fossils, punctured marks of a prehistoric life” (104).
London as the narrator knew it, and as the novel’s first readers know it, is now prehistoric, and
a new reality has arrived. The narrator reaches a similar conclusion when she visits the most intimate
future ruin of all: her own flat. Once she and her partner are allowed home, they encounter
a changed space, reshaped by the floods. Entering the flat, she observes something new among all
the debris that used to fill her life, “a spreading blotch, a mural of mould” (125), a symbol of the new
post-flood reality.

Submerged Narratives
Up until now, I have been concerned with what is depicted in these flood fictions, and especially how
these novels provide a potentially more productive way of representing climate change, both literally
and symbolically, than many other climate fictions have hitherto done. They do so because flood
fictions connect the reality of present and future climate change to familiar stories and striking visual
iconography. Yet flood fictions do more than merely depict: floods seep into the very works
themselves, breaking apart language and eroding narrative coherence. Such metafictional flooding
seeks the boundaries of the novel as genre. Not, I will show, to foreground the limits of the novel, but
rather to highlight the ways in which it expands and cracks to show its possibilities in a time of crisis.
As I mentioned above, much scholarship is invested in foregrounding the representational obstacles
and shortcomings of narrative in the Anthropocene, drawing the conclusion that narrative as we
know it, particularly in the form of the novel, is necessarily inadequate.11 Yet such arguments are
challenged by contemporary flood fictions, and in particular the role that narrative form plays in
them. My discussion of metafictionality, fragmentation, and language erosion in the following pages
addresses the neglect of form in scholarship on climate change literature. Despite agreement on the
challenges that climate crisis poses to narrative, scholars have, as Vermeulen puts it, “so far to a large
extent evaded the question of form, and dissolved it into questions of genres and objects” (“Beauty
284 A. BRACKE

That Must Die” 9). Form, however, is essential to how flood fictions communicate life in the
Anthropocene. The uncertainty that the reader feels as the way in which she gains access to the
narrative falls apart, for instance, reflects the deep epistemological uncertainty at the heart of the
Anthropocene.
In the flood fictions I am concerned with in this article, narratives, books, and knowledge are
continually at risk of being lost. Roza’s father in When the Floods Came recalls the burning of books
as libraries were digitized. When Roza stumbles on an apartment filled with physical books, she is
enchanted. Despite her access to films and presumably books from before the collapse, one of her
most precious belongings is a physical copy of Birds of the British Isles, which she carries with her as
a sort of talisman. Not, she suggests, because she might encounter any of the birds described in it,
but as “a way of touching the past” (117). In Gee’s The Flood, books and archives are destroyed as the
waters rise, leaving behind “a great muddle of loss and forgetting” (loc. 1858). The loss of books does
more than comment on the kind of short-sightedness that exacerbates anthropogenic climate crisis.
While flood fictions and other climate novels are filled with characters and regimes who try to erase
the past—for instance, by getting rid of books—such acts usually lead to further chaos. Identifying
similar patterns in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Taylor
suggests that the loss of books functions as a kind of “self-reflexive negation, in which the book
becomes an account of its own undoing” (126). While in his reading this negation leads to the novel
becoming “a conspicuous—perhaps even constitutive—absence” (126), I would present the loss of
books in flood fictions and climate fictions as acts of self-legitimization, a means of emphasizing the
vital importance of books to civilization as we know it. The destruction of books is not a mere
material fact in these works, but intimately tied in with the wider collapse of (Western) civilization,
as such suggesting a connection between the two: the loss of books, these novels propose, will lead to
a wider collapse of civilization.
The most powerful strategy that novels have to depict loss and collapse is literal fragmentation of
both the narrative and language. The Carhullan Army is structured as a series of records, some
complete, some partly destroyed, in which Sister talks about her life at Carhullan and, in sparse
detail, the attack on Rith at the end of the novel. The further the reader progresses in the novel, the
less material becomes available. What exactly happened in Rith and how Sister has come to be—as
we can assume—questioned about her activities remains unknown. Emilie Walezak argues that the
records of this interrogation, in which Sister relates her memories, show the “destruction of
a familiar national identity from the near past” as well as an attempt to “resist dissolution” of the
regional Cumbrian identity into that of the centralized military government (3). I would argue that
the fragmentation of the records as they appear in the novel is also a form of resistance, a means of
telling a different story from the official story.
The End We Start From takes this experimentiality and fragmentation a step further. It is highly
fragmented in its layout and use of language, as such disrupting the reader’s access to the storyworld.
The layout of the novel’s pages reveal Hunter’s work as a poet: the paragraphs are short, consisting
often of only one or two sentences, and they are separated by blank lines, asterisks, and passages in
italics. The language is sparse, and the characters are no more than initials. The passages in italics,
reminiscent of creation myths, ground the twenty-first-century story in an older tradition of floods
and writing about floods. At the same time, these passages require the reader to switch back and
forth between narrative levels, between the diegetic level of the narrator’s story and the extradiegetic
or paratextual passages in italics. This switching back and forth highlights the role that stories play in
helping us to make sense of the world, while never allowing us to get wholly immersed in the
narrator’s story—that, because of its fragmentation, is already hard to access. The result is a sense of
alienation that captures the experience of understanding and living with climate crisis.
Throughout the novel, the narrator of The End We Start From is concerned with finding the right
words to describe her experiences. Her explicit attention to language is another metafictional device
by which the novel prevents complete immersion, while making the reader aware of how the
language we use shapes our perception of climate change. In the novel, this process works the
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 285

other way around as well: language is not merely used to describe the flood—the flood seeps into the
language the narrator uses. Watery similes abound. Her newborn baby’s eyes are like “sharks’ eyes”
(6). When he is born, he comes out all at once, “like a seal on a wave” (39). The news is watery as
well, both literally and figuratively: the narrator listens to the radio at words that “seem to swell from
under me like a bath filling up. Like indigestion. Like something no bad simile could ever do justice
to” (7). Appearing mostly in the first third of the novel, the water’s power abates—and with it its
influence on language—the further away the narrator gets from the flood. Yet as adept as she is at
finding fitting descriptions and metaphors for her son’s birth and development, she runs up against
a wall when it comes to describing the violence following the floods. For a time, she has faith in
language—if only she can find the right words, things will be better. When she is reunited with her
partner, she tries “to name the difference [between before and after], give it a word or two. This will
help” (120). Yet for some things—such as the death of her partner’s mother in a stampede, or being
assaulted at a checkpoint—no words can be found. After her experience at the checkpoint, she tries
to, quickly, describe it nonetheless: “Theyforceusoutofthecarbabieswillmakeussafedoesn’tseemtrue-
theyareroughwithusandtheysearchustheymakeustakeourclothesoff” (64). By not, or barely, being able
to put experience into words, the narrative of The End We Start From does not foreground the limits
of narrative—as critics such as Morton and Clark might suggest. Instead, the novel makes a formal
decision here, to use the possibilities and limits of language as a means of depicting living through
climate change.12 To put it differently, the narrative here uses form rather than mere content to
describe climate crisis floods and the subsequent collapse of civilization. While this, as Vermeulen
suggests in relation to Station Eleven, might be a “less spectacular and apocalyptic” means of
representing climate crisis than employed by many other climate fictions (“Beauty That Must Die”
16), it engages with the challenge of representing the Anthropocene head on.
Once the narrator of The End We Start From has made her way back to London, she realizes how
words have lost their meaning: “Home is another word that has lost itself” (98). The novel’s concern
with the limits and possible inadequacy of language echoes scholarship on dystopian fiction in which
such falling apart of language—what I would call language entropy—is common. Particularly in
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), “the death of language” (Boxall 218) is a means of imagining
the end of the world (Masters 114). While these analyses can be extended to flood fictions such as
Hunter’s, I would argue that narrative fragmentation and language entropy do more than merely
point to the end of the world—or, more precisely, Western civilization tied in with written culture.
In addition to capturing the experience of living in the Anthropocene, language entropy and
narrative fragmentation also make another metafictional comment here. These techniques are used
to embody the tension between the world and the text, between reality as it exists and the formal
means to capture it in narrative. The answer to these tensions is not to try to resolve them either
creatively or critically—for instance, through a blanket dismissal of conventional narrative—but
rather to take them as the starting point for a further exploration of narrative fiction.
I have argued that by depicting floods as both a consequence and means of imagining climate
crisis this subset of novels goes some way toward tackling the challenges of representing
anthropogenic environmental change. While in doing so, issues of temporal and spatial scale
remain, literal and symbolic floods provide a lens through which to explore climate crisis that
has previously been unexplored. My reading of these flood fictions intervenes in debates on
representation, especially in regard to traditional forms of narrative such as the novel. I have
foregrounded the possibilities that the twenty-first-century novel offers: rather than pointing to
the vastness of climate change as a reason to abandon the novel, I have shown how novels—
especially flood fictions—not only depict climate crisis, but also interject in conversations about
the novel through metafictionality, language erosion, and narrative fragmentation. The novel as
a whole, and flood fictions in particular, provide a rich terrain to explore climate crisis. By
testing and breaking the boundaries of narratives, these works do not, as some critics might
suggest, demonstrate the limits of conventional narrative. Quite the contrary: flood fictions
286 A. BRACKE

utilize the full potential of the novel to expand the form itself while—importantly—providing
readers access to characters and worlds. This access to the text, and the empathic response that
the reader subsequently experiences, is what novels do best. As such, it makes them invaluable in
our present moment.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. For a discussion of twenty-first-century cultural awareness of climate crisis, see also Astrid Bracke, Climate
Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel.
2. The term “climate fiction” was first coined by Dan Bloom. Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions provides the
first book-length exploration of the genre, although he prefers to use the term “Anthropocene fictions.”
3. Examples of scholarship on climate change attribution science include Schaller et al. on the 2014 floods in
England and Christidis et al. on heat waves caused by climate crisis.
4. A notable exception is Tate’s chapter on floods in Apocalyptic Fiction.
5. The long history of flood myths shows how, as Taylor notes, “ecological calamity is in fact one of our oldest and
most persistent stories, recurring across genres and centuries from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Moby-Dick” (112).
6. See, for instance, Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet for a discussion of Google Maps; “Lost Dogs” and
Imagining Extinction on the database as a means of imagining extinction; Morton, The Ecological Thought on
experimental collage; Clark in Ecocriticism on the Edge for a further discussion of this. See Cohen and
LeMenager on the ecological digital humanities.
7. A focus on the possibilities of the novel and narrative rather than on obstacles also runs through Vermeulen’s
work. See “Future Readers”; “Beauty That Must Die.”
8. For an extensive discussion of the role of emotion in environmental narrative, see Alexa Weik von Mossner’s
“Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion.”
9. Urban flooding in particular shows how climate change is already happening (Dobraszczyk 868), as do
incidents of heat waves and extreme weather.
10. Given the coastal location of Brighton, this seems like a peculiar decision. The flooding of London and removal
of the government to Brighton, then, has more symbolic power than it makes literal sense.
11. For a summary of this discussion, see Vermeulen, “Beauty That Must Die,” page 9.
12. I am indebted here to Vermeulen’s discussion of the motif of snow in Station Eleven, which, he argues, is a way
for the novel to register “its awareness of its detachment from disturbing events; in that way, it qualifies that
reserve as a formal decision rather than a statement on the purported unrepresentability of the collapse of
civilization” (“Beauty That Must Die” 16).

Notes on Contributor
Astrid Bracke is the author of Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel (2018). She writes on climate crisis, floods,
ecocriticism, and narratology.

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