I didn’t mean to go book shopping. Writing that reminds me of the Arthur Ransome title: ‘We didn’t mean to go to sea.’ But, anyway, there I was in Blackwells in Oxford and I knew I wouldn’t leave without some new reading. I bargained with myself…well, if you’re going to buy, then make it something different, an author that is new to you.
I left the shop with 3 new paperbacks: ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson, half cheating as it’s been on my ‘to read’ list for a long time, ‘The Incredible Crime’ A Cambridge Mystery by Lois Austen-Leigh, about which I knew nothing and then ‘The Wager and the Bear’ by John Ironmonger.
I have just finished the last of the 3 and found it, well, quite overpowering in some ways. I think I shall take quite sometime to process the story. The author told his agent that he wanted to write a climate crisis novel and that is very definitely what this is. A great story but making no bones about getting the global crisis message over to the reader. This is a hard sell but you cope with it because the main characters are so very passionate and full of belief. There is no doubt here about what is going to happen to the planet.
John Ironmonger sets his novel in St Piran on the coast of south Cornwall. I wondered whether this was a real place and thus looked it up. It sounds real because St Piran is almost Cornwall’s patron saint but it appears not to be an actual place name.
Tom is our hero. He is a young climate activist who over a pint of local cider in the harbour side pub challenges the local Tory MP, who he deems to be entitled, privileged and a climate crisis denier, to a wager. This wager will prove whether the climate is warming and the waters are rising …or not. The problem is that the timescale is lengthy and as this wager is filmed on a phone and gets into the media, it taints the whole of Monty Causley’s political career.
This book is obviously the result of detailed research and we spend much of the story time in the Arctic on remote research stations. We are offered vignettes of 100 years of Tom’s life at different points and the wager is still alive, as is Monty. If there is now a genre of climate change books then this is certainly where this novel belongs. If not, well then it offers samples of romance, family saga, thriller. It is all there. It is a terrific read that will find its place on my bookshelves.
Oh, and what of the bear I hear you ask. I think you will have to read the book to find that out.