Not with a bang, not with a whimper, more with a green-inked letter of complaint and a designed-to-be-overheard grumble. The world in Joy Williams’s new novel (her first long-form fiction in 20 years) is definitely coming to an end but this time with a mixture of resentment, indignation and apathetic fightback. Following an unnamed catastrophe that seems to have eliminated most land animals and poisoned most trees, “all conservation attempts are considered reactionary... People think the planet is attempting to make threats... and it pisses them off”. The human race, as pictured in this fever-dream snapshot, is certainly no longer represented by angry Thunbergs or hard-talking Attenboroughs. Avoidance seems to be the key: “The amusement industry has heroically re-established itself. Disney World has rebooted and is going strong.”
In fact, the only people willing to do something are the aged and terminal who have gathered at a crumbling former hotel they now call the Institute, resolved to dedicate their imminent deaths to fiery protest. Khristen, our teenage guide to this blasted world, stumbles across them in a search for her mother some time after the apocalypse has struck.
Khristen, originally named Lamb (this is not a book that is shy of religious symbolism or language), has been sent to a boarding school where “There were no books, no paper. One was simply supposed to remember the gnomic things the instructors uttered.” Even this is probably a relief after a childhood with a mother who was convinced that her daughter had died for several hours while in the care of a babysitter, during which she “witnessed ruthless and troubling mysteries”. Doctors refute this quasi-death experience, but her mother obsessively attempts to retrieve what her daughter saw anew; Khristen/Lamb has no answer. Keeping her daughter home-schooled in the hope of a breakthrough, her mother employs tutors who are as likely to ask her “How do you spell commensurable?” as “We all lead three lives, the true one, the false one and what is the third?” Compared with this, a paperless, gymnasiumless, Nietzsche-quoting school seems like a distinct upturn.
But when the school closes, Khristen is placed on a train to the conference centre where her mother was last located. Gradually passengers disembark and “the moment I realised that I alone remained on board, the train stopped for good”. She locates the hotel in question on the shores of a huge lake – now poisoned and black – known simply as Big Girl. There, she finds herself among the dwindling band of geriatric eco-terrorists, even though “those of your age are anathema to our whole concept”.
Marshalled by Lola, herself a triumph of Vicodin over reality, the remaining residents are a “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts... determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”. The problem is that macular degeneration or osteoarthritis can severely militate against the efficiency of terrorist outrages. Honey finally hobbles towards her target but is “ripped in strips” by a shotgun-wielding householder as she reaches for one of his tomatoes. When Lola finally strikes, blowing herself up at a factory making baby wipes, the result – beyond her own death – is negligible and unremarkable. By this point, we are in the neighbouring town, presided over by a 10-year-old judge who insists, when Khristen is brought before him, that she read and parse a passage from a Kafka short story.
By now the novel’s credentials are clear: this is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dalí, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos. Williams has always skirted near this territory: in her last novel, The Quick and the Dead, nominated for the Pulitzer prize, the quasi-surrealism perfectly captures the adolescent outlook of her three teenage heroines. And the result can be very funny – Williams has a delicious ability to land a gnomic assertion and then watch its inherent contradictions twist in the wind. Harrow is less immediately witty – maybe because the tangible reference points are so distant, so surrealised, that the contradictions are inevitably less immediate – but the overall picture is intense, disturbing and always questioning.
And the title? We are told that the symbol of the new government, painted on all available walls and doors, is a harrow. But what exactly is it? A dictionary will tell you it is a form of plough, designed to break up and smooth out the earth. But surely the more intended image is the “harrowing” that Christ unleashed on hell, during those dog days between crucifixion and ascension, in order to release the captive souls. In fact, this whole book feels as though it is set in a kind of limbo, a period when mankind must decide which way it wants to turn: down to a slow death in the hell of Disneyland or up to resurrection by caring for a planet that otherwise seems doomed.
• Harrow by Joy Williams is published by Tuskar Rock (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
