Treating the symptoms of climate anxiety

When I started writing Perilous Times—a novel in which Arthurian knights return from the dead to save Britain from peril in an exaggerated post-Brexit dystopia—I was suffering from an acute case of climate anxiety, the symptoms of which are no doubt familiar to many of us who are concerned about climate breakdown. In its early stages it manifests as a certain creeping dread, a difficulty imagining the future without a sense of foreboding, a growing fury that so little action is being taken to soften the impact and ameliorate the cause of climate breakdown. As the condition develops, patients often exhibit the desire to cause traffic obstructions and throw soup at famous paintings. (And with good reason: when planning non-violent protest over a Zoom call can lead to a five-year prison sentence, you might as well engage in more disruptive forms of protest.) In particularly hopeless cases, the patient sometimes writes a piece of climate fiction, suffering from the mistaken impression that this might actually help the situation.

Books are made out of trees, and writers of cli-fi are largely preaching to the choir, because climate change has (regrettably) become a hotly contested theatre in the culture war. Anyone brave enough to don a hazmat suit and wade into the one-star Goodreads reviews for Perilous Times will quickly see what I mean. I don’t think there’s a recorded case of ostrichitus (otherwise known as “head-in-the-sand” syndrome) being cured by the quick administration of a really profound and insightful piece of climate fiction, although I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

Suffice to say, I didn’t write Perilous Times with the expectation that it would change anything. I wrote it with the primary intention of making people laugh. Its success in this regard has less to do with my sparkling wit than it does with the inherent funniness of the Arthurian legends upon which the novel is based. There’s something deeply camp and absurd about the Arthurian mythos, captured so brilliantly by Monty Python and Spamalot. The original legends are full of bizarre incidents, talking animals, and convoluted tests of chivalry. Even the legend of Arthur’s messianic return, coming to England’s aid in its hour of greatest need, is funny when you stop to think about it. Why didn’t he give his magic blessing to Phil Foden’s left foot and make 2024 into the year when football finally came home? Why hasn’t he returned from Avalon to protect the realm from ecological devastation? Of course, even if he did, he would not be particularly useful. A sixth century Romano-British warlord wearing chainmail and wielding a shortsword, speaking Latin or old Brythonic, would probably try to purge the land of Saxon and Norman immigrants rather than setting out a bold environmental policy. Even if he had magically appeared in Berlin in the 89th minute, he would probably have been sent off a minute later for messily dismembering the referee and most of the opposing team.

This seemed like a sufficiently amusing concept to serve as the basis for a novel. And, as it developed, I realised it could serve as a vehicle for serious commentary on the climate crisis. Why do we allow ourselves to get distracted by factionalism instead of uniting to protect the planet? Why are we so willing, even eager, to abdicate our communal responsibilities and wait for a strongman to come along and solve all of our problems? What does a hero look like in the 21st century? These became the central questions of the book.

When faced with grim headlines and an uncertain future, we can yield to despair or we can try to nurture a few bright sparks of joy and merriment in the darkness, and I think this has always been the primary duty of storytellers. I don’t know how the bards and poets behaved during the fall of Babylon or the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, but, during long winters, our post-Roman ancestors would gather around the fire in crowded mead halls and listen to tales of heroes and monsters, retold and respun in new ways by each successive generation. Perhaps we need to take a similar view of climate fiction: it can’t be used as a cure for climate breakdown, but it can be used to treat the symptoms of climate anxiety. It can serve as a source of joy, comfort, solace, and catharsis in perilous times.