Novel Readings

We are frogs in a saucepan. All of us. We never noticed the water getting warmer and warmer. And now it’s almost too late to jump out. We tolerate the slow erosion of our climate the way a frog in a pan tolerates the rising heat. This year, we lose one percent of our coral reefs. Never mind. We can live with that. Next year, we lose another one percent. Hey. Never mind. And then another. And another. And in a hundred years they’re gone and we never noticed it happening.

“Frogs are smarter than we imagine,” John Ironmonger reveals in the notes at the end of his novel The Wager and the Bear, “and will escape from the saucepan if they can.” Frogs, that is, are smarter than we are. After all, not only can they not be blamed for starting the fire or putting the pot on to boil in the first place, but given a chance, they overcome their inertia. We, in contrast, just keep denying either that there’s a problem or that we can do anything about it. By “we” I don’t mean each of us individually, of course. I mean society, nations, governments, humanity collectively. Lots of people keep trying to make better choices, but our individual efforts (recycling! giving up plastic straws! taking shorter showers!) feel increasingly pointless in the absence of the kind of massive reforms that can happen only with total commitment from the people in power across the globe. How hot will our pot have to get before enough people agree that it’s intolerable? I’m writing this with Halifax under a heat warning; it’s worse elsewhere and it’s only June. And, as Ironmonger’s protagonist Tom Horsmith explains angrily to a political operative accusing him of pessimism, it’s not as if we only just learned about the looming climate crisis:

We’ve known about global warming for decades. The first COP conference was in 1995, for God’s sake. Way before I was born. Al Gore made a big deal about it in 2006. Remember him? . . . We’re on a rowing boat heading towards a massive waterfall, and the people in the front of the boat are yelling for us to stop, but the people rowing the boat are all facing backwards, and they can’t see the falls.

For both principled and personal reasons, Tom is determined to fight as hard as he can for change, but even he can’t help but wonder if it’s worth it:

And if all the people who give a shit about the planet manage to change anything, maybe they’ll get us all to slow the climate collapse down by ten years or so. But what’s the point of that? If humanity hangs on, it will be a miserable shitty existence for the next hundred thousand generations. What does ten years matter either way?

The Wager and the Bear is not, thankfully, just speeches or rants of this kind strung together, and Tom is more than a device to deliver this kind of bad news. The instigation for the novel’s plot is an encounter in a pub between Tom and another (better off, less popular) resident of his Cornish town, Monty Causley, who has become an MP. They get into an argument about climate change in which Tom shows up Monty’s ignorance. “You shouldn’t try to argue if you don’t understand the science,” Tom concludes—or should have concluded, except that he has been drinking and is enjoying the appreciative audience. So he bets Monty that in 50 years he won’t be able to sit in his front room without drowning. Riled up, Monty counters with a “real wager”: in 50 years, either he will sit for an hour in his front room at high tide and drown . . . or Tom must “walk into the sea and drown.” It’s a ridiculous wager, but as happens these days, it is captured on video and goes viral. As a result, Tom and Monty’s lives are linked in various ways over the years until (and this is not a spoiler, as it’s on the back cover!) they end up on “an iceberg with a ravenous polar bear”—and even this is not quite the end of their adventures! Ironmonger’s challenge is to sustain the drama and humanize his characters while keeping the novel’s underlying polemic vivid and urgent. This is really what interested me the most about the novel, and one of the reasons I was curious to read it: I think Ironmonger was trying to create what I might call a “condition of the planet” novel, akin to the 19thC “condition of England” novels I have read and taught so often. He even uses some of the same tools as Dickens and Gaskell: melodrama, coincidence, suspense, symbolism (yes, it’s an actual polar bear, but what ensues when it joins our antagonists on their floating ice carries more than literal resonance, I thought). Where Gaskell’s task was to help her middle-class readers really grasp the nature of urban poverty, Ironmonger’s is to make us frogs feel the heat and think about the costs, especially to the not-us. He lavishes his attention (and his best writing) on the ice-world of the Arctic:

It was a seascape of unimaginable, ethereal beauty. The flat ocean was a patchwork of swirling blues, some areas dark, and some pale, and some almost green, or turquoise, as if an artist had splashed every blue from a watercolour paintbox onto a pure white canvas, and crusted the surface with pack ice. The backdrop was the great precipice of the glacier, and behind it, a horizon of white mountains fading into a clear blue sky. Only the cracks and pops of the glacier disturbed the majestic solitude of it.

When I commented on Bluesky that The Wager and the Bear had left me feeling bleak, Ironmonger himself showed up in my mentions and said he was sorry about that. I don’t think he should be. I have talked so often with my students about the value of dissatisfaction. What is there left for us to do at the end of Pride and Prejudice? But the end of Middlemarch leaves us asking precisely Dorothea’s question: what can we do, what should we do? It is dispiriting to know that we aren’t making and probably won’t make the kinds of decisions that could cool things down. We seem condemned to boil in a pot and on a stove of our own making. Ironmonger does leave us with a better vision, though, or a mission statement:

We owe this to our children. To our grandchildren. To protect the meadows, the woodlands, the jungles, the savannahs, the oceans, and the ice caps. We owe our children the pristine world we were given. It is our duty. It should be right at the top of every action list we write. It should also be our joy.

“Dear reader!” exclaims Dickens at the end of his most overtly didactic novel, Hard Times; “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!” The Wager and the Bear is a good read—suspenseful, emotional, neatly structured in episodes that carry us across generations—but the Victorianist in me especially appreciated its unabashed sense of purpose.