There are some speculative fiction stories that are so close to being real that you could almost mistake them for happening today. That’s the advantage—and the risk—of writing near-future genre fiction: The events and the characters are so recognisable that it gives the text not just verisimilitude but a sense of absolute sincerity. That text might also prove itself wrong in its near-future depictions, but when it comes to Tina Makereti’s latest novel, The Mires, I frankly doubt it.
The Mires is climate fiction in a way that is both very low-key and entirely approachable. It’s centred around a set of neighbours: There’s Sera, an environmental refugee who settles in Aotearoa New Zealand with her husband and small daughter; Keri, an impoverished single mother of two; and Janet, an elderly white woman who is racist, isolated, and saddled with the return of her adult son Conor, who has fallen into an online maelstrom of white supremacy and terrorism.
Migration and colonisation is, within The Mires, an immediate and ongoing theme. Keri and her family are Māori, and, although Sera’s family is of indeterminate origin (they are said to come from “a small city in a Mediterranean country”), they are clearly perceived by Janet as outsiders, and it’s naïve to think that there isn’t a racial element to this. This interplay of climate change-induced migration and how it illuminates interactions between Indigenous people and settler colonialism, as well as between Indigenous people and refugees, reminds me of another Australasian text that engages with similar themes, also written by an Indigenous author. The Swan Book, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons back in 2015, was written by Alexis Wright and also contains swampy magical realist elements. (I strongly suspect that a close reading of the two texts together would prove rewarding, and have made a note in my “draft papers” folder to that effect.)
Those swampy elements are interwoven throughout the book. The opening section of the novel is in fact narrated by the swamp: “Swamp runs beneath everything, especially in places like these, even though you have drained and paved and dammed us.” In The Mires, swamp is resilience and memory and history, and it retains these things more successfully than humans do. “People are forever in the act of coming to know something and then losing themselves in or from that knowledge, forever going through enlightenments and dark ages, then collectively forgetting their history.” This is a theme that returns again and again, as attitudes to migration within the text are both connected to, and disconnected from, individual and national experiences of the same.
Due to climate change, Sera’s homeland has become uninhabitable: “Food and land became scarce, clean water scarcer. Everyone continued as if ignoring the problems would make them diminish, and people got hungrier, and angrier.” Fires and droughts and heat waves are constant, and to make a new life with her husband and child in New Zealand, Sera has had to leave her community and extended family behind. The loss is profound, and it’s not something that can be remedied by transportation to a safer environment, even if that new home comes with plenty of grass and clean water. “Outside, so much green,” Sera thinks; but the presence of healthy vegetation doesn’t stop her from weepy dreams of her family asking her why she has left them behind.
There are a lot of Seras in our collective future. How we react to her and to people like her, if indeed we are not her ourselves, is in many countries—including my own—an ongoing debate. The plain fact is that New Zealand is likely to be one of the countries that is more insulated from the effects of climate change than others. We have certainly had an increase in weather events over the past few years; parts of the country are more susceptible to drought. On the other hand, over 80% of our electricity comes from renewable sources and we produce a lot of food. Furthermore, our isolation and lack of land borders means that we are insulated from much of the sheer scale of displacements and migrations that can be seen in, for instance, parts of the Mediterranean.
If things get bad (worse) on a global scale, this may well be one of the luckier places to live.
Like many countries, there is a continuing debate here about refugees and how many we can or should accept. Given that there’s likely to be a whole lot more environmental refugees in the future, this is not a discussion that’s going away. I’d like to think that Sera and her family could find safety and welcome here. It’s possible they’ll find Janet instead.
Janet would tell you she’s a good person. She’s outside gardening when she meets Sera and her little daughter Aliana for the first time. Less than five minutes into the resulting conversation, however, and Janet can’t help herself. She’s identified the family as “not from round here” and that’s both euphemism and enough. “I hope you know how lucky you are. Heaps of New Zealanders don’t have anywhere to live. I know it’s bad where you came from, but it’s bad here too, and having foreigners come in makes it even harder.”
I wish I could say that I didn’t recognise this. There is a tendency for people who aren’t terribly familiar with NZ to think that it’s a little island paradise at the bottom of the world. Peaceful, friendly, liberal. While that can be true, it’s also true that we have an extremely good marketing department and skate by on old victories. There are a lot of Janets here. The fact that, having had these thoughts, this particular Janet goes back inside and starts to make Sera a banana cake as a “welcome to the neighbourhood” gesture is equally recognisable. [1]
For all her instinctive classification of Sera as “other,” however, Janet is herself a product of migration. Like me, she’s a Pākehā: a white European New Zealander, and the history of colonisation in this country is replete with examples of land theft and injustice. Not that this is anything that Janet considers while criticising Sera’s own migration; the comparison is beyond her.
This refusal of identification is further illuminated by Keri, whose reaction is completely the opposite. She and Sera immediately bond and begin helping each other, realising that both of them are struggling to survive in the wake of exploitation and disaster. Keri’s ancestors were internally displaced due to conflict with settlers, “and were eventually forced to migrate south.” She “was surprised to find their ancestors described as refugees.” Both Keri and her teenage daughter, Wairere, discover “so many migrations in their family history. So many wars, so many moments of seeking refuge, their people displaced over and over again, sometimes displacing others to survive.” These are some of the forgotten and rediscovered histories that the swamp speaks of, at the beginning of the novel, but the swamp speaks of other identities as well.
The presence of water links both landscape and those who live within it. So much of the human body is water, and “swamp runs through your veins.” This shared element of the self is particularly illustrated by Wairere, whose supernatural connection to the swamp on which she lives bubbles up increasingly throughout the novel, until the swamp bursts from the confines placed on it and becomes, through her, an agent of justice as well as memory and identity.
I admit, the use of the swamp as both metaphor and active character, possessed of its own agency, is one of my favourite things about this book. There’s a strong environmentalist streak to The Mires, and I’ll always be on the side of wetlands.
As much as I enjoy the swamp, though, and as appealing as Sera, Keri, and their families are, the real masterpiece of The Mires lies in the characterisation of Conor, Janet’s no-hoper white supremacist son. He is both despicable and pathetic, and every time the narrative rolled back around to him I could feel myself clenching up. I was just waiting for him to ruin the lives of the decent people around him and leave the book a tragedy rather than the portrait of optimistic resilience that it is. It’s a spoiler to say so, but readers can rejoice: He fails in his attempted terrorism, managing to hurt no one but himself. In a just world, all like him would end this way. I say this because, if you’re holding off on reading this truly excellent book due to its disquieting similarities to everyday life raising your distress levels, don’t despair. There’s a happy ending. People come together, nature fights back, the bad guys get theirs, and even Janet comes around.
You’ll feel better after reading it, is what I’m saying. This is, fundamentally, a tremendously hopeful book.
But back to Conor, and the sense of wordless dread that his spiralling inspires. There’s a lot of talk going around lately about the so-called male loneliness epidemic and how it impacts on society. One of the consequences of this is that these lonely, isolated men are vulnerable to being sucked into hate groups. You know the ones: They hate women and immigrants and people of colour and basically everything and everyone that isn’t a mirror of their own soul-sucking inability to connect with anything that’s even remotely different to themselves.
And you know, I can see the appeal—on a theoretical level, at least. If there’s someone else to blame, it’s not your fault. If only things were different, Conor thinks, he’d be appreciated more than he is. Watching him get suckered into justifying, and even taking part in, terrorism is depressingly plausible. The attempt to instil fear and horror in his community is thwarted by the fact that the group he’s hooked up with are pretty damn incompetent, but the motivation is there. Conor doesn’t mean to fail in his attempt to bomb the local Culture Fest, and he should be judged on his intent rather than his success. [2]
I don’t feel sorry for him; I feel sorry for him a little bit. When someone’s this disconnected from everyone around them, it’s easy to see how they’d fall for an ideology and a group of fellow believers who tell them that they’re worth something, that they aren’t expendable. I sigh as I type this, thinking to myself that Conor—nasty piece of work that he is—isn’t worth anything, that he is expendable, and that’s the vicious little trap that Makereti has laid in this story, isn’t it? The swamp again and how we treat people, remembering and forgetting.
For all that Makereti’s portrayal of Conor is a piece of horrible genius, however, making him the centre of the story—or of this review—is a disservice to the actual centre. “People are basically decent,” says Janet, and it’s the decent people of The Mires—Keri and Sera especially—who are holding their families together, who are holding their communities together, and who are putting themselves out there, making connections, sharing, learning, making an effort. Hell, they even influence Janet and her banana-cake racism, though personally I’m withholding judgement on the permanence of her small improvements.
People are basically decent. There’s going to be a lot of different people coming together in the next few decades, products of environmental disaster and migration, and we’re all going to have to be basically decent together. So argues Makereti, and the swamp can take anyone who disagrees.
Endnotes
[1] We’re a small country. When I say that we all know Janet and we all know that banana cake and we’re all using the same recipe, it’s an exaggeration, but not by much. (Edmonds Cookbook, if you’re wondering.) [return]
[2] And ultimately, it is Wairere who stops him. It is the swamp that stops him. Even his mother tries, brought face to offspring’s face with her own moral failings. He doesn’t stop himself. [return]