Roz Dineen
Briefly Very Beautiful, set in the near future in a country that is never named as Britain, involves some bold world-building choices. Which of these were the easiest to make, and which the hardest?
Those choices were quite straightforward. I was drawing logical conclusions from existing conditions. If this, then this. If fire, then smoke. I don’t think much in the world of the book is invented (except for the terrorist group, Gaia, and even that is really just an extrapolation – what would happen if Incels found that Mother Earth was the perfect woman/lover they’d been missing all this time?), most of the things that are described – food shortages, extreme weather events, internet shutdowns, climate migrants etc – are happening somewhere in the world, I just concentrated them all in one place. And is it a huge leap of the imagination to picture a government who have only just realised that the window of opportunity to secure “a liveable future for all,” has been missed? A government who simply cannot fulfil its mandate on a very basic level? Such a government might turn inwards and protect its own assets, like a private company with added military protection. The tax base has probably already dried up in this scenario, funding to public services plummets. At the same time, we know that there is a link between climate change and human health, particularly between climate change and mental health. Cases of schizophrenia peak in high temperatures. So, suddenly, you’ve got a very hot day, only the visual leftovers of an infrastructure, no wizard behind the curtain, schools are closed because of the bad air caused by wildfires, there are higher than average numbers of people walking into an unfunded, hardly functioning hospital experiencing a serious psychotic break – and, amongst all this, a mother’s trying to make sure her kids feel loved.
I didn’t have to do much. I just walked existing propositions gently to their logical ends with as little hysteria as possible. Really gently.
The truth is that as life changes the only certainty is that there are always going to be people trying to hold on to how things used to be. That’s why The City in the book is so strange, I think: there are all these parents around the school behaving as if everything is FINE! Everyone’s disassociated.
What was the genesis of the book? Were there any real-life events which sparked your imagination?
I became obsessed with reading climate journalism on my phone, on the train, every time I left my baby to go to work. I also remember all those stories around Brexit. One day’s news cycle consisted of the fear that we wouldn’t have clean water in the UK because the chemicals used to purify the water wouldn’t be able to make it to us in time. Then there was lockdown. All of this, naturally, sparked my imagination quite a bit!
However, the real genesis of this book was that I kept coming back to the idea of a young woman with her baby standing under the sun. Everything between the woman and the baby is blissful. They’re in a cocoon. Did you know that babies can’t really see that far when they’re born, nor for the first few months? They can see the distance from their mother’s breast to her eye. That’s it. And I think the mother, all things being well, has a similar distance of vision. Their smallness of vision is both lovely and terrifying. And all around them, the world is burning. The sun is too hot and too large. But there is something beautiful in that moment, nonetheless. The baby will grow, and leave the mother, the sun will burst, these things are inevitable. And yet, this moment leading to the end of the world is beautiful. This was the first image of the book, I think.
What books influenced you most when you were writing the novel, and did you began writing it did you have a clear idea of what kind of story you wanted it to be? Or what kind of future-set story you didn’t want to write?
I didn’t have any clear idea of where I was going with this! Around the time I started writing, I stumbled on a book called The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, (1987). It didn’t make me think about climate change so much as the exploitation of earth’s finite resources. The book explores ancient matriarchal cultures, and how they were regenerative, returning nutrients to the land; they were not based on a mentality of ruling to win or expand. The Great Cosmic Mothers explains a model for leadership that is only about maintaining, not exploiting life. And it also laments the removal of the truly spiritual part of the human from our societies – which is very interesting. I was also influenced by R. D. Laing and A. Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, 1964, for reasons that may or may not become clear if you read the book! And J. G. Ballard, of course.
Your central character, Cass, is driven by her love of three children – two of whom are her stepchildren – and her need to protect them is at the heart of the book. What made you decide to put family ties centre-stage in a much wider collective drama?
One book reviewer in Australia said that Cass was an allegory for Mother Earth and I thought, Yes, OK! I hadn’t articulated this to myself because, to me, Cass is very real and I would never comfortably address her as a cipher for anything. And yet, it works. Cass has experienced her own internal ecological collapse, alongside the earth’s, at the hands of capitalism. A society that looked after the earth better, would probably look after its mothers better too. Cass and the children are centred because, if they can find a way through a world that has been ravaged, not just by greed, but by the sort of relationships that a capitalist, patriarchal society supports – then there is hope for us all.
What effect do you hope the novel will have on your readers? Without giving any spoilers, you do gesture towards a hopeful future at the end. Do you feel personally optimistic about the future of the planet and human civilization?
I feel optimistic about the future for humans. Less so for civilisation as we understand it.
How do you see literature responding, or failing to respond, to the climate and ecological emergency?
So often, in everything we do, we’re just making offerings to a system that is ultimately exploitative of life. Really good art can force this machine to stop, even if only for a second, it can allow you to be. I don’t think that literature has to be specifically about the climate or ecological emergency to make you wake up to yourself and this moment of being alive and what a blessing that is … I hope I don’t lose too many readers when I say that I believe when you are filled with the realisation of this blessing, the next human instinct is to protect life.