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‘The Arctic is melting…’
‘The Arctic is melting…’ Photograph: Dirk Notz/AP
‘The Arctic is melting…’ Photograph: Dirk Notz/AP

The Ice by Laline Paull review – allegory in the Arctic

This article is more than 6 years old
Human intrigue is mixed with climate change in this tale by the author of The Bees

“Where is the fiction about climate change?” Amitav Ghosh asked in these pages last year. It’s a good question: glance at most publishers’ catalogues and you would never know that humanity was facing the greatest challenge of its existence. Laline Paull’s two novels to date have brought humanity and narrative to the changes already under way on Earth – and unlike most environmentally conscious fiction, they’re intended for a mainstream audience. Her Baileys shortlisted 2014 debut The Bees followed the life of a single lowly bee; its anthropomorphised bee characters smiled and wept and shouted in joy, enchanting critics and readers with their richness and warmth.

Her second novel, The Ice, focuses on human intrigue in the warming Arctic: in its opening pages, a glacier calves to reveal a body, several years dead, and the novel plays out as an inquest into this death. By embedding a mystery in layers of melting Arctic ice, Paull brings narrative tension to a phenomenon readers typically encounter only in environmental or scientific reporting.

The body, we learn early on, is former Greenpeace chief Tom Harding, who had been persuaded to lend his integrity to a scheme dreamt up by his old friend Sean Cawson, a businessman and the novel’s protagonist. The men bonded over a mutual fascination with the Arctic as students in Oxford’s Lost Explorers’ Society, before growing apart as adults. The plan that reunites them is to build in the Arctic “an inspiring venue in which to promote the reconciliation of business and environmental ethics” – precisely the bifurcation that has divided their friendship. With a habit of leaving little to deduction, The Ice continues: “And here they were, the two of them, actually living out that conflict, at this very second.”

As that quote suggests, The Ice tends towards allegory. As characters take the stand at the inquest, they seem to represent various attitudes to conservation, each given an opportunity to have their say. Here’s Sean: “The Arctic is melting … While some people are wringing their hands, treaties fall wildly out of date and business capitalises. So choose denial, or choose – like I did, like my partners and I have actively and responsibly done – to be at the vanguard of those changes and make sure they happen in the most positive way.” Later, a professor of ocean physics, called upon to testify about the changing conditions in the Arctic, asserts that Tom’s death “can itself be attributed … to the reckless endangering of our planet by every industry that ignores the environmental recommendations for how to operate, and to every government that fails to abide by the Paris Agreement.”

Laline Paull’s debut followed the life of a single lowly bee. Photograph: Miles Willis/Getty Images for Baileys Women's

All this polemic is rather a lot for the characters to carry, and at times the fiction wears thin. Critics praised The Bees for kindling concern for a threatened species through rich storytelling, without grinding any axes. That novel was an exercise in empathy and imagination. By contrast, The Ice is structured as a blame game, its setup going straight to the heart of responsibility for and appropriate responses to climate change. If the primary concern is to spread an environmental message, this is ideal. If the goal is to write a nuanced piece of character-based fiction, it’s less so.

And if the environmental message is the novel’s primary concern, it’s somewhat weakened by the circumstances of Tom’s death. Ghosh concluded that literary writers have avoided writing about climate change because they deem it too strange for fiction, that they dread inspiring incredulity with extreme and unpredictable events even as such events become the norm. The Ice is built around an extreme event, and it inspires some incredulity – though not, as Ghosh suggests in his piece, incredulity that such an event could happen; rather that it should dovetail so neatly with the tensions between characters. In the context of the novel, it’s actually rather predictable. This forces the destabilised Arctic to make sense on a human level, which is precisely what it will not do.

Nonetheless, the final pages are a triumph. Here, Paull slips into a more nuanced mode, delivering fragmented reports on places and players: we flit between a pub, a plane, a car crash, a shipwreck and news reports. It’s a rousing passage that, in its simultaneity and its resistance to simple causative relationships, brings the novel closer to the complexity and truth of life and of nature.

The Ice is published by Fourth Estate. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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