A remarkable debut of societal collapse and the search for refuge
BRIEFLY, VERY BEAUTIFUL ROZ DINEEN 326pp. Bloomsbury. £16.99.
WHAT DO YOU CALL science fiction that’s barely fiction; literature set in a tomorrow whose hot breath we already feel on our necks? Whatever you choose to call it, Roz Dineen’s debut novel is an exemplar of the form: a woozy tale of dogged survival set amid the dying embers of an instantly recognizable world. In its exploration of an almost-now in which new realities press up against, then swarm over, old civilities, it stands alongside the likes of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future (2020) and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020). And in its looping, lyrical prose, it surpasses both.
Briefly Very Beautiful opens on a vision of an English city – “The City”, maybe London, maybe Birmingham. Like the rest of the world, it is in the grip of a creeping deterioration. “Every aspect” of it, we learn, “had grown slowly worn and useless over years – the hospitals, the schools, the transport, the food, the bills so heavy, the bureaucracy slow-motioned into a farce.” The causes of this breakdown are manifold, but one – the climate crisis – appears to have driven all the rest, as well as giving rise to the more narcotic grace notes that contribute to this particular apocalypse’s initially sedative atmosphere. “The summers”, we hear, “became longer and longer and hotter still and extended into other seasons”; children “fried sloppy eggs on the asphalt and called it a science lesson”; “blooms as big as heads” nod from front gardens; for several weeks, the streets fill with “thousands and thousands of butterflies”.
But abundance quickly segues into scarcity – of power, water, internet connections – and the soporific warmth, which at first leads to “ease between people”, becomes fierce heat: oppressive, inescapable, ultimately inflammatory. Fires kindle, some of them chemical, some so big they merit proper names: “The First Great Fire”, “The Second Great Fire”, “The Midlands Fire, beyond the outskirts of The City”. The air “smells of burning”. An eco-terrorist group, Gaia, launches indiscriminate attacks. The government “became a black box”; the police no longer come when called; there are new viruses, and new wars. People hunker down, eke out essentials, torpidly adhere to remembered patterns: school, when it’s open; the park, when curfew is lifted; the shops, when there’s food on the shelves. They ponder the possibility of escape.
In the midst of all this is Cass. Her husband, Nathaniel, a burns specialist, has left for a foreign war; she is alone in The City with three small children, trying to make their lives work. On the one hand, things appear disconcertingly normal – she makes toast for Vi, the eight
