Review: Blue Skies

 

I've decided to add a few book reviews to the blog, especially for new books, including books which may not yet have hit the stands yet (through the good graces of Netgalley. For my inaugural review, I've selected T.C. Boyle's eco-black comedy, Blue Skies.

 Of Blue Skies I am two minds, as perhaps was T.C. Boyle when he set down to write this book. A simple family tale or a polemic on climate change? Are the characters agents of their own actions, or has climate change replaced fate as the controller of lives? Are we doomed by our past actions, or do we simply make do?

 It’s a plodding plot, not so much a plot as a situation—situation dystopia. The world is seen alternately through the eyes of earnest mother Ottile (the wife of a doctor, comfortably middle-class) and her grown children, the somewhat superficial daughter Cat, and son Cooper, an entomologist and the Cassandra figure of the tale. Cat lives with fiancé Todd in Florida, while he other two are in California. One coast in perpetual drought and the other perpetually water-logged. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames on one coast while whole neighborhoods are reclaimed by the sea on the others.

The setting is not some future dystopia, but the dystopia of today and perhaps the next eight or so years in the future. The story captures the mundanity of experience at the end of the world. Sundowners and king tides (two weather phenomena I’m not familiar with, but apparently soon will be) intrude on the rituals which mark our lives, marriages and births and deaths. There are moments of joy and tragedy, as in any lives, and whether those tragedies are caused by a collapsing planet or human inertia and hubris is rather fuzzy.

 This was by no means a slog to read. The story is underpinned by diamond-hard prose which is a pleasure to read. Characters are fully realized and complex. Perhaps it’s the author’s ambivalence, whether our world is truly at an end, or whether we can survive on cricket cookbooks and drones for pollinating our crops, that leaves me scratching my head. We’ll all muddle through somehow.