Fauna

The sumptuous imagery and limpid atmosphere forms a dizzying picture of a world after human existence.

Reminiscent of Ovid, Kafka, and Wells … depicts the hypnotic Darwinian nightmare our negligence and denial will lead us to in the coming years.

… chronicles not so much the end of the world, as the end of a very specific, rather repugnant humanworld… one of the most beautifully written books in contemporary anglophone climate-fiction.

With a devotion to language, to rhythm, to imagery (beautifully translated by Pablo Strauss) Vadnais injects a mythical, even scriptural quality to the stark realities of global warming.

A paragraph

Time passes. No sea monster has deigned to nip at the feet he dangles underwater. When the clouds begin their descent, a bearded giant with arms thick as lifebuoys disrupts Thomas’s solitude to heave garbage bags into the lake. Thomas would like nothing better than to be a ballast for these sacks of trash, dive in among the roiling waste as it makes its way slowly to the bottom of the lake. He wants only to decompose with this garbage. But this garbage will endure for centuries, as Laura would have pointed out. Laura, his sea dragon, his rara avis. His sunken treasure.

Some might claim Alex left them after hours of acute suffering. In truth it was over in a microsecond, like the flip of a circuit breaker. She was there; then she wasn’t. That woman who just yesterday had wielded her knife with a survivor’s ferocity was now a lead-coloured lump at their feet. The world around them teems with life. In the river, in the puddles, under rocks, in every atom of the waterlogged earth in which they are digging a hole to lay their companion to rest. Worms, beetles, fungi, algae, viruses, protozoa. Calliphora vicina. Everything is inhabited: the sky and the forest, the river and the living soil whose every crevice overflows with water. Alex will not be buried alone; she will be laid in the ground with the agents of her own decomposition.

Even just a few kilometres from Shivering Heights there was no foretaste of apocalyptic weather, just a grey gloom and puffs of fog lapping at the car’s headlights. As far as Agnes can see, vaporous white patches lie skulking on the ground. They look almost hungry, she thinks, checking her rear-view mirror. The car chugs along at a steady pace, piercing a wall of cloud that closes behind it like a curtain.