There’s a certain quote that gets digitally passed around these days, like a dismal spliff, whenever a flood or a tornado or a hurricane lays waste to a city or a town or a wilderness:
Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.
Originally an anonymous tweet, the text most recently made its way around social media in response to the wildfires devouring Southern California. Unspecified, but easily deduced, is the sentence’s implied “you”: the addressee is someone initially, but not permanently, sheltered by geography or money from the worst effects of climate devastation. (It came to light during the Los Angeles conflagration that the uber-rich have begun hiring private firefighters to protect their property during catastrophic fires. God Bless America.)
The viral post’s framing of environmental doom as a shark, circling the lifeboat of the privileged more and more tightly until fin and teeth are no longer over there but right here, structures Julia Armfield’s latest novel, Private Rites. The book follows three sisters living about as comfortably as is possible in a near future flooded by endless rain. Like the women’s specific city of residence, the cause of the catastrophic weather is never made explicit (though London and climate change are the likeliest antecedents, respectively). In declining to name the where and why of her apocalypse, Armfield suggests that what came before is both obvious and inconsequential, in such an irreparable world. [1]
Isla, Irene, and Agnes Carmichael all live high enough up, socially and physically, that the rising water table registers mostly as an inconvenience and a bummer. The less fortunate wretches below “abandon rooms given up to damp,” drown trying to get to work, and even “throw themselves into deepening water” in despair. But the Carmichael siblings, perched delicately in high-rise apartments and hillside houses, have the relative luxury of focusing on crises of the heart: their ever-tenuous relationships with each other, with other women, and with their father, who’s just died.
This last event catalyzes the book’s Lear-ish plot. After the patriarch kicks the bucket, the siblings are forced to grapple with their troubled inheritance, a word that they understand to mean “both … what is owned and what is embodied.” Carmichael was a bad husband and worse dad who dedicated his architecture career to keeping wealthy clients’ houses above sea level in a postdiluvian era. The sisters “had always protested and railed and argued against so much of what [their] father was to them, of what he symbolized.” What would it mean to accept money from such an interpersonal and existential jerk?
Even more loaded is the question of the family residence, a steely behemoth that rises and falls with the tides thanks to Carmichael’s clever design. Isla, Irene, and Agnes worry that taking custody of the house would mean endorsing the world order that their Fountainhead of a father represented: the regime of rapacious capital, resource hoarding, and individualism that presumably hastened the present deluge. It would also mean continuing to dwell on and within the poisonous family memories that the chilly house embodies. (Oh, and a final unwanted hand-me-down is the weird cult that seems to be following Carmichael’s death—and his heiresses—with undue interest.)
When it’s all written out like that, it sounds as though a lot happens in this book. Yet it doesn’t always feel that way. There’s a plodding pace to things in Private Rites, and by design: In this novel and in general, Armfield has said that she’s most interested in “minutiae”—not the big-box, cathartic horrors of extreme times, but the workaday details of how people get by during them. And so Private Rites’s protagonists spend most of their days out of the fray, tapping away at email jobs and sighing about the ridiculous cost of cheese. This portrait of life lived entirely indoors will evoke an “oof” of recognition from a reading audience that endured years of COVID lockdown—well, at least from the comfortable “you” whose pandemic consisted mostly of Zoom, Doordash, and boredom rather than frontline jobs, death, and destitution.
This narrative tunnel vision is not necessarily a failing. Or at least not one that the book itself hasn’t already fully anticipated. After all, the very title of Private Rites announces the following story’s investment in specific, inner lives rather than collective, public events. And the novel stages its own self-criticism, remonstrating with itself over having chosen to focus a cli-fi novel on the broody angst of the haves rather than the egregious suffering of the have-nots. The novel’s (maybe-)Londoners
talk in circles about the Global South, about famine and panic and displaced populations, then just as suddenly cease to discuss them. … People watch reports on rapid mudslides, on communities thrown out on rafts barely made seaworthy, and don’t know what to do or how to relate this to themselves.
Even more so than television, fiction’s ability to open up a direct line to characters’ thoughts could give it a leg up in helping us “relate [stories about other people] to [our]selves.” But this passage seems to suggest that if a disaster story dials the misery up too high, it risks pushing the imagined reader beyond her empathetic limits and into indifference.
In fact, Private Rites does shoehorn a less affluent, more civic-minded character into its dramatis personae, but it’s an awkward fit that only casts the novel’s true psychological priorities into starker relief. Jude, Irene’s nonbinary partner and a social worker, is easily the novel’s least engaging character. Interpersonally and professionally, Jude’s commitment to action over rumination means that, even when the novel gives them the chance to narrate their own experience, there’s not much to see behind the curtain. When a coworker asks how they’re doing, Jude thinks back on the morning’s litany of grim encounters with housing relief clients and shrugs, “No complaints.” Hard to believe; even harder to “relate … to.” Later, considering their relationship with the prickly Irene, Jude reflects that “It is easy … to love a difficult woman. Easy to become the solid place around which she gathers herself … the mooring from which she hangs.” Jude is clearly the kind of person who holds the world together when it’s crumbling, and we’re all grateful such heroes exist; but Armfield seems to find them poor sites of novelistic interiority. They are “solid,” after all, literally hard to see into. Give us the “difficult wom[e]n” instead. (Armfield does, in the three sisters, and they’re bratty-fun to spend time with.)
Putting aside the ethical dimension of narrative attention, Armfield’s commitment to the reality effect works in the novel’s favor, artistically speaking. Small, sensory details filtered through an individuated psyche: This is the cognitive machine through which we all perceive and construct experience, no matter our place on the socioeconomic ladder, and Armfield is an able machinist. Try not to feel secondhand clammy, for instance, as you read about the ferries that have replaced the underwater Underground: The boat passengers are a “wet press of bodies … jangled, damp, soporific, at once sleepy and unsettled.” Nor is this sentence just an effective transmission of an imagined experience. Its portrait of zombified commuters also captures the broader political impotence of Private Rites’s populace—one that has largely submitted to the climate crisis (and the government’s mismanagement thereof) not with a bang, but a whimper. [2]
After acclimatizing us to mundanity for 250 pages, though, Private Rites’s ending pulls the rug out from under us. It’s the book’s biggest gambit, and a gloriously successful one. We’ve had the sense for a few chapters that things are getting worse—like, bad worse—even for our well-heeled protagonists: Their fancy apartment buildings and offices are flooding; sirens are sounding across the city; the doomsday cult is closing in. There’s nowhere left for the sisters to go but their father’s seaworthy house.
Supposedly seaworthy, that is. For the shark has finally come for this luckiest of lifeboats. The symbolism of the patriarchal seat sinking into the water is hard to miss, and it’s accompanied by interpersonal and meteorological changes of state, as well: The formerly selfish Irene assumes a big-sister role for young Agnes; the forever rain suddenly freezes into snow. But Armfield declines to offer any hope for structural change alongside these other transformations. Instead, the few people that survive the last days of the flood figure it is “Best to keep on, wherever this is possible. … Best [to] struggle back into dailiness. … to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.” The possibility of collective action seems unthinkable, at the future point in time that Armfield describes. It is not so, yet, in our own.
Endnotes
[1] Fittingly, the only time the word “climate” appears in the novel is in the context of the structural disaster that likely laid the groundwork for this climatological one: capitalism. (A landlord cites the “unstable financial climate” as justification for raising the rent.) [return]
[2] Conversely, Armfield sometimes loses her footing when she leaves behind the material realm for pure abstraction. She veers into the obvious with declarations like “The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people.” [return]