Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel by Adeline Ohns-Putra (review)

As a study that investigates contemporary narratives for their framing of ethical obligations to the future of the earth and its human inhabitants, this book could not be more timely. Adeline Johns-Putra's Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel considers how American and British novels of the past three decades wrestle with the question of our responsibilities to future human generations. Although not reflected in the title, this book is a focused study of "parental care ethics"—of using the framework of Anglocentric parent-child relationships to generate ethical consideration for the environment as climate change threatens human survival. Johns-Putra investigates how narratives of parental relationships contend with the challenges that climate change brings to bear on the novel, namely the problems of representing posterity, thinking in deep-time, and extending any ethical system into a profoundly unknowable and uncertain future. While this study is limited in its reach, it is a carefully researched examination of Western parental care and its associated ethical frameworks as they appear in contemporary works of climate fiction in the American and British contexts.

The book begins with a substantial introductory chapter that evaluates parental care ethics alongside other ethical frameworks, such as utilitarian ethics and care ethics more generally. In her discussion, Johns-Putra carefully folds in recent critiques of ethics modeled on Anglocentric notions of the nuclear family, as such ethical systems comfortably abide with notions of human exceptionalism, heteronormative conceptions of family, inheritance as capital accumulation, and caretaking and parenting as inherently female work. However, Johns-Putra's project here is not merely to consider recent critiques of parental care ethics but to understand how the particular ethical entanglements of parenting are potentially exploited for radical thought in contemporary climate fiction. To that end, Johns-Putra proposes a "eudaemonistic" model of reading (informed by Martha Nussbaum's notion of eudaimonistic judgement) that "emphasizes the reader's imaginative identification with fictional characters and their conditions…as conducive to the development of sympathetic acknowledgement of shared vulnerability with others and of a eudaimonistic desire to address that common vulnerability and promote a common flourishing" (45). While this argument about literature may not be original, its specific use for reading climate fiction is unique: Johns-Putra argues that recent climate change novels create an emotional identification through depictions of familial relationships in order to interrupt expected ethical frameworks and social orders—these novels "invite the reader to inhabit a parental care ethics" in order to "critique these ethical stances" and to "allow radical ethical alternatives to emerge." Johns-Putra claims that recent fictional depictions of posterity work to "destabilise these anthropocentric worlds and identities as a basis for environmental concern for the future" and thus "destabilise the very idea of coherence in the world" (40).

Each of the four chapters following the introduction explores two novels that feature familial relationships, and they are analyzed for how they create identifications in order to challenge or modify their expected ethical conclusions and associated worldings. Beginning with The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and The Ice People (1998) by Maggie Gee, Johns-Putra reads for how these narratives render the "limits of parental care as an ethical position" by exposing how gender and identity norms are imbricated in parental care frameworks that rely on engines of competition, paternalism, and genetic survivalism. Chapter Three examines the ethical dilemmas that mark difficult debates about population growth, reproductive rights, and resource scarcity. In her readings of Edan Lepucki's California (2004) and Liz Jensen's The Rapture (2007)—two novels staged in near-future settings ravaged by environmental collapse and extreme weather—Johns-Putra explores conflicted decision-making about procreation, motherhood, responsibility, and environmental justice on an ecologically devastated earth.

Turning to the question of contingent identity, Chapter Four reads The Stone Gods (2007) by Jeanette Winterson and The Carhullan Army (2007) by Sarah Hall for how they interrogate notions of stable identity upon which ethical...