A stranger comes to town, and everything changes, including the stranger. It’s an old story. But before that change can happen, we need to know what is. We need to grasp the sense that the characters in this novel don’t feel they can change—or, at the least, that they have insufficient agency in their own lives.
This sense of stuckness makes the first section of The Future a frustrating read. The novel’s title, and the knowledge that this is an alternate history, set the investigatory senses running, but the reward seems thin. Gloria has taken a house in Fort Detroit, a place she had visited once, fifteen years before. She is unable to parse the place she is now living in, unable to engage when her neighbour’s father is run over in the street. Gradually we discover that Gloria’s daughter, Judith, was an addict who lived in this same house with her two daughters, that Judith is dead, and that the girls have disappeared. Slowly, Gloria learns about the people on this street, makes friends with the neighbour, Eunice, and joins in a shared quest to discover who ran down Eunice’s father—and what happened to Gloria’s grandchildren.
Ultimately, she finds enough faith in the future to believe the girls are still alive.
This belief comes despite learning that the authorities will not be much help. The police are overloaded, drowned in bureaucracy and uninterested in what happens to people like these. For their part, the people of Avenue Clyde themselves have little trust in the police, seeing them as agents of absent authority. All this is a small step from how we have been taught to view the derelict, post-industrial Midwest of the USA; Fort Detroit exhibits all the characteristics of Extreme Rust Belt. But, in this reality, the city is in a mostly French-speaking part of Canada. Checking the history, the original fortifications were built by the French explorer Cadillac, taken by the British before the American Revolution but ceded to the new United States some time later. In this book, that handover doesn’t happen and Fort Detroit remains part of Canada. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the larger historical narrative of the Motor City, simply making the French-speakers the underclass. Or, indeed, making the underclass French-speakers—who seem to have the racial characteristics of our Detroit’s impoverished—also be those who are unable to escape the city’s collapse. Given the award stickers on the cover of the book, I suspect the original edition provides greater nuance for French Canadian readers; but for my part, I struggled to find it.
In fairness, The Future is divided into several parts, and comes alive in its second, the antithesis of the first. There is a tribe of children sleeping rough in Parc Rouge. They have created their own society, at odds with the tense, failing one outside the park. The children do not accept anything from the past, from the outside worlds. Even their names come from the group. Their present seems unchanging, living in the moment, almost without a future—except for the fear of being pushed out by puberty. This seems the inevitable fate of the oldest children, who guide the rest until they are ejected. Unbound by the rules of consensus reality, the stories they generate about themselves, their world, and each other have a sense of magical realism. And yet, their hiddenness within the park is also a result of active defence—confusing and removing the drunks and fools who wander into their territory, hiding from others.
And so we move towards synthesis, as Gloria disturbs the membrane between child and adult worlds. The adults garden the wasteland of the city, and the children sneak into the greenhouses and fields, taking fruit and vegetables, unaware that their actions are quietly condoned. Gloria is convinced that her grandchildren can be accessed by making a bond with the feral children. A pregnant pitbull observes that “[t]he soft woman is no longer soft. She’s not hard either; she’s like a flame. Her energy pierces the walls of her house” (p. 199). And this dog binds some adults and children, creating a rift within the children’s group—undermining their independence even as their circumstances improve. This is compounded by jealousy, and the oldest child’s fear that the community will not survive her departure.
A sickness comes upon the river, and the children determine to destroy the steelworks, the death island which is the source of the malaise: “for the first time in days, smiles split their faces—not of joy, but of something else, the underside of rage, the tipping point of powerlessness” (pp. 175-6). This new quest draws them back together. One of their number is an effective arsonist and amateur bomb maker, and they succeed in disabling the factory. This brings soldiers, who descend on Parc Rouge. The soldiers can’t find the group still in the park, but their cordon divides the community further, even as those children stuck on the outside negotiate their own position with the people of Avenue Clyde.
The story slides onward. The absolute callousness of the wider world is made obvious when the cause of the road accident is discovered to be a bus that takes tourists on visits to ruined Fort Detroit. Old and young combine to rescue a rundown theatre from redevelopment—what future is there for anybody in a world like this? The answer the book provides is that life goes on. The grandchildren have survived their mother and their escape. The two, very different, sisters choose to break the bonds that tie them to each other. The older, quieter, more passive girl is drawn back to her grandmother, back to an ordinary world; the younger sister chooses the wild life, disappearing into the forest and a freedom to live on her wits.
This novel is a challenge to our usual definition of genre. It is, apparently, set in the future—a future of scrabbling and loss that could envelop much more of humanity as climate change bites, making it a warning, a story of the Anthropocene. It is definitely an alternate history of that process, but this feels like a distinction that doesn’t make a great deal of difference. The telling of this history, as folk tale and argument between characters, is entertaining whilst leaving room for interpretation. There are elements of magic realism: one of the children flies; there is a black horse which resembles smoke; there is storytelling from the perspective of a dog. How much of this is metaphor, or magic, or actual? The book refuses to collapse such uncertainties into a definitive answer, instead maintaining an ethereal equipoise which is an intellectual pleasure but not at all visceral.
The Future is a story of the old finding fresh purpose in the young, whether among blood family or found family. The reward of the book is in the discovery that it is possible to live in a difficult present—and in the hard-won recognition that there is a future as well as a past. Even if neither are at all what you thought they were.