Elizabeth Heritage on a brilliant novel dealing with a climate catastrophe post-apocalypse
The first time I left the room to get away from IIML grad Clare Moleta's debut novel was on page three, when a child dies. The second time was on page 11 when Li, the protagonist, recovers consciousness in a strange place, covered in injuries, to find that she has lost her eight-year-old daughter Matti. But once I got up the courage to come back I devoured Unsheltered in two bites, interrupted only by the sun setting. It was way too scary to read after dark.
You could call it a thriller, or climate fiction, or a classic chase story (although in this case it is a mother searching for her child). It's set in a country that is “Australian but not Australia”, according to the author’s note. Climate change has wrought havoc and large swathes of the land are now uninhabitable. Massive, fatal storms drive people from their towns into refugee camps. Selected people live in ‘safe’ zones behind heavily guarded walls; the remaining unfortunates – including Li and Matti – are unsheltered. Moleta doesn’t waste time explaining how this has happened or the details of the geopolitical situation. It's enough to know that danger threatens from every turn and no institutions in power can be trusted.
All the way through Unsheltered there was a part of my brain that was screaming in one long ceaseless cry of alarm. Li is the point-of-view character throughout and we are with her in her hyper-vigilance, her constant situational awareness and relentless calculation of where she can next get water, food, shelter, information. There is no safety here, only gradations of threat: “What was happening here was still playing out, slowly slowly like a car crash, and there was nowhere for anyone to go … It couldn’t be lived with but Li was still alive.”
I kept trying to calculate how long I would last in this world (best guess: about a week). Unsheltered jerked me out of the habitual vague worry with which I usually view climate change, down through apathetic guilt and straight into pure, vibrant terror. It feels so alarmingly real. Human societies likely will react – are reacting – to climate catastrophe by doubling down on existing inequalities, and dividing the world into the sheltered and unsheltered. We are driven by our fear: “Because if they got in, if they all got in, then the whole continent would tip and go under and they’d all drown together.”
A thread throughout Unsheltered is a contemplation of how on earth we can justify continuing the human race. “Everyone wonders why they’d [have children] … They still do it. Otherwise, why do anything? … [Li had] had a child in full knowledge that the ballot would not end, that Wars would not end, the Weather would only get worse.” In flashbacks we learn that Li was ambivalent about becoming a parent and that her relationship with Matti has often been tense. But she still chose to create another human. The population continues.
Li learns that Matti may be among a group of children who have struck out on their own in search of the “best place”. The rumour grows among the unsheltered: maybe the children will save us. The holy innocents are reported to have said “People made Weather but only God can take it back. She says they’re walking to show God they’re sorry … For everything. All the war, waste, stuffing up the climate, these goddam walls. It wasn’t their fault but they’re sorry anyway.” Li rejects the fantasy of salvation but can’t help hoping that the rumours contain a clue to Matti’s whereabouts.
Other reviewers have said they found this pukapuka ultimately hopeful, but I found the headstrong tenacity of humanity in Unsheltered pretty grim. It’s not that all people are monsters – Li does encounter individuals who help her out. It’s that people en masse continue creating and upholding cruel hierarchies and divisions even to their own disbenefit. There’s a particularly heartwrenching scene in which Susanna, a trans woman, is being forcibly transferred from the women’s prison to the men’s. “She fought to keep Susanna but she didn’t understand why Susanna, or any of them, mattered enough to warrant this … it felt like a mob struggling over some resource that had already run out … For a stunned second their eyes met and she saw [the prison guard’s] uncertainty, that he didn’t know why either.” Even in the midst of fighting for our very survival, apparently, we can take time out to police the gender binary. Jesus wept.
If there is hope in Unsheltered it’s in the land. At one point Li camps by a dry lake bed that miraculously refills overnight. The ancient waterways are still running, albeit polluted. “The water was livid with birds. Gulls, herons, ducks, black swans, birds she’d never seen and couldn’t name, all calling and landing and jostling and taking off in spurts across the water, reaching down and pulling up fish … the water was heaving with life … All day the birds kept coming … The sky was solid with them, their shrieks and their shit and feathers falling … She hadn’t known there were this many birds anywhere … It made her feel like a child.” Reading Unsheltered left me keyed up and horrified and deeply ambivalent about my status as a human animal on Earth. But there is comfort to be taken from the thought that life – in some form – will continue.
Unsheltered by Clare Moleta (Scribner / Simon & Schuster, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
