Marc Winters has found his way back into the world, after the traumatic events of his sister’s death and “the siege at Wakestone Farm.” He thinks he has moved on and tries not to dwell on events eight years past. But what happened at Wakestone, what the participants think happened, and what Winters has to do with these events provide the driving force of this novel.

Some of what is eventually revealed to us is already known by Winters. But for the most part, he is focused on what he can do to maintain or repair the natural world around him as England heads into the hot summer of 2078. All the recent summers have been hot. Global heating has taken hold—something visible in both the novel’s showing and telling: Winters is a ranger, posted to Cynsea Island in the Blackwater Estuary in Essex; the thinning of the natural world continues and species that can migrate north continue to do so; replacing a dead tree with a Spanish oak is better than no trees at all. On Cynsea Island, Winters works to maintain the infrastructure of the reserve, helped by volunteers, and there is a regular stream of visitors. Winters and his volunteers make use of swarms of drones and are helped by agents which are accessed via phones. There is no great, visible AI; it has melded into the background of the world.

Given the grim forecasts of climate change in our own time, there is an optimism in the ongoing presence of birds and birders. But the stories the latter tell are mostly of loss. One birder was present for “the song of an endling … the last known wood warbler … singing for a mate it would never find” (p. 38). They describe it and its habits, and I can see it in my mind’s eye, having seen my own wood warbler decades ago, a sighting shared with a birder who mimicked its calls and actions. The birder I knew is dead now, and that individual bird is long gone, too.

Other birders in the novel talk about the old days of hundreds, thousands of starlings in murmuration—a thing we can see today, if we make the effort, but which has been lost in the next half century and is unfamiliar to Winters, who can only dream of a past with such riches. Again, this was a moment of deep familiarity for me from talking with the Old Birders in my own time; when I was delighted at seeing over twenty lapwings, they told of a time when they filled the fields. The term that might first come to mind is shifting baseline, but McAuley has a far more interesting and affective term, solastalgia: “knowing everything’s changing in all kinds of bad ways you can’t control, and also knowing that it’s only going to get worse. Anticipating a future that’s even more fucked up than the present” (p. 39)—and thereby creating a nostalgia even for the present.

This hits hard because we can see it in the world around us—at least when we choose to look—and McAuley shows us the world to come through nature writing so intense and evocative that the world around Winters is not merely background:

It was as if he’d stumbled into a dreamworld polder, or had been cast back to a time before global heating and the great extinction, the resource wars and everything else. Dry stone walls spattered with grey and orange lichens. Lush grass along the verges. Nettles, patches of fireweed, cow parsley holding up saucers of small white flowers. (p. 325)

McAuley’s focus on detail is often present, in peopled places as well as empty ones, as is the tendency to write incomplete sentences. This sentence structure exists, in embryonic form, even in his first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), but there it is hedged in with punctuation to keep the appearance of correct grammar. The “phrase with a full stop” is a powerful tool in this author’s arsenal. As above, it encourages an engagement with the senses, which happens all at once rather than in the seriality of reading. He also employs it effectively in action sequences, supporting the impression that events are happening too fast to allow for excess words.

The action, chase, thriller aspects of Loss Protocol show McAuley’s long experience with writing in this mode, primarily in a series of novels from the 2000s. The most relevant of these is Mind’s Eye (2007), in which the protagonist discovers complex visual images which can affect the mind, particularly in combination with the influence of a hallucinogenic plant, as psychedelic mushrooms are core to this novel.

Winter’s sister had, after years of campaigning for nature, concluded that the best she could do was undertake the hard work of restoration, repair, and living lightly upon the earth. She joined the commune at Wakestone Farm; but such groups can be susceptible to a guru. McAuley is effective at describing that failure when Kasey Motte appears. A charismatic individual with a strong vision, Motte imbues the commune with his belief that it is possible literally to dream a better world into being—under the influence of the right strains of mushrooms.

The narrative leaves room for the idea that the Wakestone commune has indeed made the world better through their shared dream. The participants certainly believe this, but Winters is equally sure that they have come to this belief while in a suggestible, dosed-up state. Motte duly dosed Winters: Did he actually see the emblems of a deeper reality (the Wild Hunt, the Green Man) or was he, too, a victim of suggestion? The waking dreams of a mushroom trip become true memories, even as the rational mind attempts to reject them.

So why does Winters begin to think back to these times, opening up his own painful memories? It turns out that not all of the inner circle at Wakestone were killed in their self-immolation, and Winters learns, from the police, that his sister, Izzy, was never dead at all. He wants to find her, to help her, but others who were sent out of Wakestone, and who have since been trying to proselytize Motte’s way of the shrooms, also want to find her—they want what they believe to be her hidden knowledge.

And so the goose chase begins. It is sometimes aided and sometimes thwarted by private investigator Bailey and her backer Lady Armstrong. Lady Armstrong, in turn, is looking for proof of what happened to her son, who was also part of the commune. With the discovery that other Wakestone communers are still alive, she is prepared to do whatever is necessary for answers.

For their part, the Wakestoners and the “deep dreamers” decide that Winters will do as an alternative to his sister. They come to this conclusion because they believe that Winters’s own existence is a side-effect of the “improvement” that Wakestone dreamed into being: Izzy was an only child in their original, more climate-ravaged timeline. Alongside reducing the rate of global heating and bringing back the tigers, in this version of the world she now has a younger brother. But he has a fully established timeline and life and so, naturally, Winters finds it terribly difficult to imagine that his very existence is a side-effect of making the world less disaster-ridden.

Perhaps this is the ultimate metaphor for a lack of agency—Winters didn’t even exist in the world until Izzy dreamed him into being. Indeed, even without this marker, Winters’s attempts to drive his own plot are rarely successful. At the start of the book, he helps a young drifter called S (“Just S. They/them” [p. 5]) and is repaid as S takes the role of guardian angel or lucky charm. Winters uses the influence he has, but he is virtually a non-player character in his own world, and he repeatedly falls foul of those who know more about the circumstances he is trying to understand (such as the “deep dreamers”) or who can more directly manipulate events through their own power and wealth (such as Lady Armstrong). This lack of agency is reinforced by a cool, cerebral narration and by the tendency of Winters to always be thinking—perhaps overthinking. Always, that is, except for when he is dosed by bad actors.

And so, Winters travels—or is taken across—much of England, delivering an effective survey of the state of nature in 2078. Beyond the interesting plot and convincing characters throughout, the foregrounding of the natural world was, for me, the core of the novel. It comes with an implied reprimand that we must do what we can for the world around us and remain optimistic that those who come after us will do the same. The number of end-times-believers has multiplied, and will continue to do so. Ecosystems have undeniably suffered in our lifetimes and Loss Protocol shows that continuing. And yet, carefully written and thoughtful, this book manages to be encouraging. The natural world, and all who care for it, including Winters, are more resilient than we fear. There are still many options open, both for Winters and the world he (and we) live in.