We seem to live, increasingly, in a culture of blame. I’m no different: As soon as I get on the internet and read the news I’m grumbling into my coffee regarding the sheer stupidity, the determined and cheerful gullibility, of those around me. I’m quite certain that some of them, at least, are saying the same about me. (There may be occasional justification for that.) Nonetheless, the increasing influence of ignorance, and how that ignorance is used to obtain and maintain political power, seems at present to be particularly relevant.
Many artists have something to say about this, and Vanessa Saunders is one of them. Her recent novella, The Flat Woman, is climate fiction touched by magical realism. In the past decade or so that’s a mix I’ve seen more and more of, as climate change is taking on the mantle of metaphor as well as warning. It’s a useful metaphor, considering how much of the conversation about climate change deals with different modes of seeing—the choice to see or not to see, selective blindness, and observable change—and different kinds of interaction with the nonhuman. The collision of realistic science fiction with elements of fantasy can produce some productively liminal texts, situated very firmly in the space between what is happening in the world around us and how we choose to interpret those events.
Liminality can be illuminating. It can also be untrustworthy; so much of climate change is linked with the existence and transgression of boundaries. How far can this water rise, how reliable is this coastline, what borders do we have to cross if we can’t live here? There are often no certain answers to questions like these, which can make the conversation more frustrating—especially as the answers to these questions are often couched in terms of threat and loss. No wonder there are those who are tempted not to have the conversation at all, as well as those who are tempted by answers that may be inaccurate but at least purport to promise a solution.
Both of these responses exist in The Flat Woman, and they are both separated and linked by genre.
The magical realist response is centred around transgression and refusal. The unnamed protagonist of the novella—and there are few names here, as Saunders describes the characters in distinctly anonymous terms—wakes, on her ninth birthday, to a back covered in bird feathers. Specifically, seagull feathers, which, although painful and inconvenient, do not last. They are instead the first instance of the bodily changes that the girl, later the woman, will experience throughout her lifetime. In each case, the change is a response to something environmental, and the girl/the woman takes on temporary and nonhuman characteristics that she tries very hard to hide from the outside world.
There is, after all, something very suspicious about a body that does not present as expected. Is a nine-year-old-girl with a coat of seagull feathers (or a woman with a patch of cow fur) really human at all, or is she some sort of freakish hybrid that might be experimented on or exploited—something that doesn’t need to be given human privileges at all?
The danger is there from the beginning. The girl’s mother is determined to shield her daughter from the consequences of her transgression, wanting to take concrete steps to remove this element of liminality from her daughter’s person. “Therapy would toughen your boundaries,” she says (p. 4), and throughout the novella, the daughter’s condition is described in terms of boundaries: how they have failed, and how they can be strengthened.
These boundaries are never strengthened. The girl—and later the woman—is able to conceal her changing form from those around her. Her mother and her aunt are aware of her liminal nature, but this family unit is fundamentally compromised, and the girl raises herself to adulthood incapable of effectively controlling both her ability (and her inability) to connect with others. In the girl’s defence, this is a sensible course for her to take, because the world in which she lives has little patience for magical realism, existing as it does in a state of dystopian science fiction. Furthermore, and unsurprisingly, that dystopian world links both women and the nonhuman in disturbing and all-too-certain ways.
I noted, at the beginning of this review, the existence of a culture of blame. In her book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), Carolyn Merchant traced how attitudes towards nature often move in lockstep with attitudes towards women, and this conflation of nature and the feminine is both used in The Flat Woman—as nature and the nonhuman periodically intrudes and colonises the female body—and criticised by it. In the novel’s world, responsibility for climate change, and for the observable environmental effects of that change, is officially ascribed to women. The highly corporatised and industrial world that materially contributes to economic success and thus to political power cannot be blamed—at least, not without destabilising the capitalist underpinnings of existing social and political structures—and so another culprit must be offered up instead.
This blame that is ascribed to women, in that the failing environment is perceived to be a result of their failing natures, is constant throughout the book. The increasing death of birds, for example, might be objectively described within the novel as due to industrial pollution and environmental degradation exacerbated by climate change, but when a seagull drops dead on the stage of a political rally, at the foot of a politician supported by corporate polluters, there is a ready solution at hand: The culprit is not a change in environmental law and increased ecological responsibility; it is, instead, women (somewhere, somehow) who are killing off animals, in order to undermine the increasingly monstrous cooperation between state and industry.
It will be of no surprise to readers that the women most often accused of this terrorist activity appear to be those who are most critical of existing governmental choices and relationships. The girl’s mother is a university professor: educated, capable of resistance. Uniformed officers storm their home and detain her for “seagull terrorism” (p. 8) and she is taken away as the girl cowers under the kitchen table.
With her mother sentenced in a show trial to decades in jail, and an aunt who has no interest in moving in and raising a child and so drops in periodically with groceries instead, the girl becomes an isolated and anxious woman. Tarred with the brush of her mother’s apparent crime and without reliable advice or resources, the (now) woman’s body of the protagonist continues to undergo metamorphosis. Already distrusted by society at large, the liminality of her body—the transgression of being a magical realist construct in a world of science and industry—makes the woman increasingly vulnerable to those around her. After all, if her body is inherently untrustworthy, her political opinions and her capacity for resistance can only be untrustworthy as well.
The problem with living in a society so infused with the capacity for blame, however—particularly deceptive blame, utilised as a means of providing certainty in dishonest conversations—is that untrustworthiness spreads. It has to.
The woman meets a man. She meets him in a supermarket, and the attraction is immediate. It helps that he appears to be a rational person in an irrational world, one who is aware of the manipulation of blame, especially as it applies to women, and who is aware of the real causes of bird deaths and environmental degradation. Romance develops, and it’s isolating: The man gets a job as an Elvis impersonator in Nevada, and the woman goes with him. There, bereft of even the smallest familiarity and advantage of her home environment, the man’s mask begins to fall off. He does not think of himself as a bad person (he is), but he has been raised in an environment of blame—and all his protestations of respect and equality and personal responsibility have been entirely skewed.
“You shouldn’t be eating so much,” he tells her, after she orders a green salad at restaurant (p. 106). He has been discussing her with other men—the all-male enclave of Elvis fans. “I think some women turn to food—to fill their voids—which makes excess waste,” he suggests (p. 107). This is, he informs her, a likely consequence of genetics. Women’s habits and biological inferiority are linked together. Weakness on an individual level results in environmental calamity at scale; although this is clearly not an issue when the man indulges himself with strawberry ice-cream. That’s different: “I need to eat,” he says (p. 120). Biological necessity, and biological superiority.
The woman gets a job cleaning at one of the POP’S COLA hotels, scrubbing sculptures of the soft drink company that has helped to produce the dystopian hellscape in which she finds herself. “Why would you work for a company responsible for imprisoning your mother?” the man asks her, part of an ongoing argument on his part that compromising with inequality and exploitation is not morally different than actively engaging with it (p. 94). Again, that argument is selectively applied, as the male-only Elvis enclaves restrict women from the same sexually charged entertainment that the men are providing for themselves. “Don’t make excuses,” he says. “Take responsibility” (p. 94). Except the responsibility that women are meant to uphold is responsibility for everyone, for the entire climate crisis, while the responsibility that the man models is one of self-centred individualism. Readers will easily imagine what happens when the man discovers the woman’s liminal nature. Reporting that shit to the authorities is only the responsible thing to do.
Because The Flat Woman is a novella, the depiction of this soul-sucking relationship is necessarily brief. As is, to be honest, a lot of the worldbuilding. POP’S COLA acts as stand-in for business and the political economy in general, and there’s little exploration of how this culture of blaming women for nature has developed or sustained itself. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions. I don’t think, in this instance, this is necessarily a drawback. The Flat Woman may illustrate the space where magical realism meets dystopian science fiction, but it’s a story of metaphor insinuating itself into cold reality … a story which ends with the triumph of that same metaphor, as the woman stops hiding her mutable, transgressive nature and, together with the nonhuman world around her, begins to fight back. “You and I live in a different world,” the man tells her (p. 129), before he really understands just how different, and it is the one point where he is emphatically not wrong.
He doesn’t realise that they live in different genres as well. The mash-up of science fiction and magical realism is occurring more and more in climate fiction, and it’s something that I find both fascinating and enormously enjoyable. It’s the world that we live in, come up against the way that we interpret it. Perhaps that interpretation could use a little bit of magic, sometimes, to help us cross the boundaries and start to see another way of doing things.