The High House by Jessie Greengrass review – apocalypse and family love

The joy of raising a child, even on the other side of disaster, is intercut with our current slide towards climate chaosFrom Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour to Jenny Offill’s Weather and Doggerland by Ben Smith, the “cli-fi” genre is growing exponentially – no surprise, given the coming crisis. In fact, as an artist in any medium it can feel self-indulgent, in 2021, to be making work about anything else. Jessie Greengrass’s Women’s prize-shortlisted debut novel, Sight, used motherhood as a springboard to explore wider ideas of psychoanalysis and medical history; her second tackles the subject of global heating head-on, conjuring a near-future vision of a flooded East Anglia. Where it excels is in its characters’ recollection of the slow, incremental progress towards disaster, and the effort ordinary people made, every day, to block their knowledge of it out: “Crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static,” Caro, one of the survivors, recalls.As the novel opens, Caro is a teenager. Her father’s partner, Francesca, is a high-profile climate scientist and campaigner; it’s a mission on which Caro’s father will join her, too. Francesca may be principled and tireless, but she’s also unlikable, her constant insistence on the coming apocalypse cutting her off from most forms of simple human joy. She’s an astute creation on Greengrass’s part, providing readers with a channel for their discomfort; Caro’s weariness with Francesca’s warnings mirrors our own.–Sal,Grandy said,–they’ve just lost their parents.–They’ve got each other,I said. Grandy gave me a long look.–And you’ve got me. Continue reading...