The title of the best novel I will read this year comes from a line in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1983 speech, “Hunger.” Found in her essay collection Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989), the piece begins with Le Guin reciting her translation of a poem about Machu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. It asks if human suffering paid for that glorious structure in the mountains of Peru. Expanding on that concern, Le Guin declares: “No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it” (p. 50). Both Neruda and Le Guin argue that human accomplishment is properly judged by the starvation of those who worked. However grand our structures, without justice for all of humanity, we are doomed.
The Hunger of Those Who Built It is a mystery about developing an egalitarian Eden in the center of Paris in 2033 and the potential healing of a fractured family, but it has a more suspenseful story to tell. The main characters have the best of intentions but fall victim to their own idealism. Can technology solve the problems it has created? Can we fix what ails us as a species?
Since World War II, we have introduced pesticides that nearly erased species, cut and poisoned entire forests into deserts, warmed our summers beyond our capacity to walk safely out of doors, overpopulated our cities and dehumanized strangers, and often denied our culpability for these ecological and cultural disasters. Humanity may be destroying the world we live in. Acknowledging its destructive influence creates room for human solutions which could benefit not only individuals but the overall health of our planet.
It may not be too late to repair what we’ve broken. The trick seems to be finding the will to do it. Wendy Waring’s debut near-future novel examines how we might use what we already know to make the world a better place—while questioning whether change will benefit everyone or only the few. “Picture a stone dropped in a pond” suggests one of Waring’s characters (p. 11): The ripples create rings around old Paris, where new privilege collides with a traditional population and sense of fairness.
Waring reminds us of the way the world works. Creative people may offer practical strategies to repair our fragile world, to stop global warming, to ensure everyone is fed and that water is safe to drink, and to treat all human beings fairly. But those with the power and wealth may respect only their own needs.
The Hunger of Those Who Built It is, then, set in a familiar world with familiar problems—climate change, desperate refugees, and racial and religious bigotry. American engineer Diane Griffith has risen from an impoverished background to earn a reputation as a person who can accomplish great things. Diane leads a team on a project constructing a self-sufficient and egalitarian Eden in the heart of Paris in 2033. The vision is that residents will participate in a completely self-sustaining urban environment with sewage treatment and clean water and food fresh off the vine. It is Diane’s expertise in designing vertical and rooftop gardens that will allow locals to eat entirely from their own minimal labor. Other team leaders focus on fish, waterways, energy, and processing waste.
Their goal is idyllic. Paris will become a model for such development throughout an Earth struggling to support frightened and suffering people. Diane narrows her focus to the challenge of producing healthy food in an urban environment. She is heady with optimism. Diane’s idealism is sincere, but the beauty of this green urban paradise rubs against the very real danger of her situation as an outsider and a hireling. Her French is perfect and she’s spent a lifetime disguising her humble childhood—she is careful to fit in, to do whatever she must to achieve the goals of the project:
Diane had been so excited when she’d arrived with her news. Design a Greenbelt for Paris. A nurturing wall of food and freshness embracing the ancient arrondissements.
But Helen was disappointed. “You’re building an enclave for the super-rich.” (p. 40)
Helen is Diane’s younger sister, an outspoken activist opposing the excesses and abuses of the world’s elite. Helen is cynical about where humanity is headed. She warns her sister of the dangers of assuming those who can make change care about others; Diane is in denial about that violation of her paradise. While Helen actively works against what she sees as a threat to all of humanity, Diane imagines a better world. She overlooks others who have the power to make better happen. Soon, though, other team leaders express concerns about what they aren’t allowed to know: Secrets and silence greet their questions about who will live in this new Paris and who will work there. Diane discovers the truth of her sister’s warning. Nothing she imagined will go as planned.
By 2049, her objective has become not to celebrate but to search:
Just after New Year’s, Helen’s kid Lou had stopped posting in the usual forums. Diane hadn’t worried at first. Lou wasn’t a child anymore. Weeks Passed. Months. Diane started searching—circling out from likely, to improbably, to tearing the whole damn house apart. It reminded her of looking for Helen fifteen years earlier, following internet trails to dead ends. Did Helen know that Diane had watched over Lou from a distance? Did a decade of lurking and invisibly guiding her sister’s child count as care? (p. 24)
Diane reluctantly accepts an invitation to return to Paris to find both Helen and Lou, her niece. In and around the city, Diane looks for news of Helen, who has not spoken directly to her in a decade. But something secret and even horrible is happening in Paris, and it’s something else Diane doesn't want to face. From required neck ring “torcs” which track location and define access to robot servants and a fully armed police force of drones, the ultra-rich funding the project hold all the cards. The hand she's been dealt might be as dangerous as her sister Helen has always insisted it is.
The character and timeline shift from the point of view of Lou in 2049 to Diane’s early work in 2033, and then to her return in 2049. Now an honored guest, she is careful not to confront how the rich and powerful have abused her accomplishment. For days and weeks she skates a delicate path among people who would judge her humble social background and send her packing if they suspected her real intentions. Quietly, Diane searches nearby neighborhoods and outer districts for clues to her Helen’s continued existence.
If in 2033 people are afraid to talk to her, to be seen with her, then when she returns in 2049, everything is even worse: “Resistance was secret business now,” we are told, and Diane‘s agonizing search reveals the tension between creative idealists and the greed of the rich and powerful. Climate refugees and the local poor do not serve the interests of the entitled, and Diane winds up out for blood.
Like all the best dystopian novels, The Hunger of Those Who Built It forces readers to confront the current drift of history into disaster. Nothing about this novel is far-fetched, the science already exists, and the will to exploit our world for personal advantage is already in power. The Hunger of Those Who Built It reminds me that I know the daughter of a multi-millionaire who is building a private, secure paradise with other trust-fund babies on an island off Central America. You’ve heard such stories, too. Whatever they claim about fairness and democracy, there is a tiny element of humanity with an extraordinary sense of entitlement, and those people don’t care who gets hurt in pursuit of their comfort.
This is a compelling story from a Canadian publisher, Stelliform Press, which publishes books confronting “our world’s most pressing problems: climate change, ecological destruction, and the effect of these issues on how we relate to each other and to the other beings that live with us in the world.” Ignore a problem and it never goes away, only becomes more and more difficult to correct. Here, the coming disaster results from missed opportunity and outrageous use of power. Waring’s world is not falling apart, at least not for those in power, but the exploitation and abuse she reveals is all too familiar.