The Deluge is just that, a deluge of a book, clocking in at 880 pages, and there were plenty of times while reading the tome that I kept remembering that I have a life to live. Still, I’ll confess that I’m glad to have read The Deluge, although why I’m glad can offer up only a mixed set of reasons.
First, some basics, including that Markley can write—he’s a good writer. Second, the aim of the story is admirable, in its attempt to capture the next dozen to fifteen years of America’s work on climate change, and the story does this. Third, characters are well-developed, especially considering there are a lot of characters; there is one character who is scum to start, but Markley handles this arc beautifully and provides through this character an intimate portrait of redemption, although in the service of a plot point, of course.
Chapters alternate among several characters, along with the occasional faux New Yorker or guest essay in The New York Times, this one written by real climate change people, as in Al Gore, Bill McKibbon, and James Hansen, although obviously, considering that the NYT essay is dated December 10, 2028, it’s all fiction. The book at times proved a bit of a puzzle with which character’s chapter I was starting, but not a deal-breaking puzzle. Occasionally there’s a faux government or political report thrown in, and, especially in early chapters, Markley uses a meta-fiction device of excerpts from a wide range of content sources arranged like sidebars or, even, whole page collages; I found these intrusive, until I didn’t, and I came away thinking he’d pulled off this sort of trickery that served especially well for quickly supplying background without character exposition.
I have some quibbles. The big one is less quibble and more an argument, which is that Markley amps up the climate change effects, basically twisting the dial to eleven, especially for the period of time that starts more or less now and ends in 2038. My argument isn’t that climate change consequences aren’t so severe, but rather than the scope of devastation he posits would have had more carry-over consequences, as in, basically, society’s collapse, or near to, anyway. It isn’t that there aren’t aspects of collapse, because there is a string of economic recessions, including one that is described as worse than the Great Depression, but America keeps on trucking (in one plot line, literally). The trouble around the world is likewise underplayed, even while disasters around the world are of a magnitude that would have more dire consequences. I’m mostly complaining about his titration of climate change consequences being off enough to have distracted from the story. A tighter hand on climate change effects and a tighter story to map these effects more accurately would be how I’d go.
In fact, I did in my book Kill Well.
That said, I was talking with an old climate change pal, and he was critiquing my book, Kill Well, which is the first book of The Steep Climes Quartet, and he took me to task for not having some of the climate change activist characters talk more about the why and what of their chosen work. Of course, the time span of Kill Well is less than a year (about 7 months, I’m pretty sure!), but my friend’s criticism is valid and when I revise the first book, I’ll probably swap out a few pages in order to put in some corrective text, mainly in the form of dialogue, because a) people do like to talk about what they are doing and b) people do like to complain about bad things, at least more than I’ve represented with some characters.
In a lot of ways, The Deluge makes me think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, but The Deluge’s scope of characters is much wider even while his sense of the world at large is narrower. Robinson also describes economics-based climate change progress plans more convincingly, even to the point of placing the reader at the table in meetings of politicians and bureaucrats, which may sound boring, but, honest, it is well done by Robinson. The politics of America is a big focus in The Deluge, although the collapse of political moderation (yeah, yeah, I know) is so extreme that there would more likely be full societal collapse following on from this extremity, so see my earlier comment about the volume turned up to eleven earlier. The political extremism is funded by Big Oil, which makes sense, except that the business of Big Oil would be taking giant hits from the devastating climate change effects. I’m happy to paint these guys as villains, but I’m pretty sure they are not complete idiots, and so, I say, this is another scenario example of the book’s tendency to exaggerate.
It is easy to exaggerate clime change consequences, but even in the near term these are in the news. But the scope of these (here in America, anyway) remains a small part of the country and devastating mainly only for those caught up in this disaster or some other. And, yes, one man’s climate change consequences is another’s worse-case scenario, so maybe you need to keep this in mind and read The Deluge yourself. I will note that Markley and I describe a similar event, which is the destruction of Miami and the Gold Coast, that extremely vulnerable venerable piece of real estate and large human population center, and my event takes place in the second book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Dear Josephine (out Spring 2024, so get your copy!), which take place around 2029, and my storm is smaller, albeit, the biggest ever recorded; his takes place a few years later and is a monster that wipes out a big chunk of the East Coast, so maybe I am simply suffering from storm envy. Or maybe this supports my point that there is a mismatch in apocalyptic destruction and the continuation—albeit with many stresses—of the old order (albeit it with what the Chinese might call The Convulsive Great Leap Forward).
With such a large reader investment as The Deluge requires, I would have liked to see fewer characters reacting to and concentrating on how the country answers big climate change events, even while such events were best made a bit less apocalyptic. But then, undeniably, The Deluge is big, including in its ambitions.
I liked a lot about this giant climate fiction novel, but also found myself asking a lot of questions throughout the book, as you can see.