Poisoned paradise

For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be… we begin to realise that we have more past than future’. With the approach of her 50th birthday and the onset of the menopause, she is struck powerfully by this notion. Her response is to leave London and to relocate, with her husband and their six-year-old daughter, to the American West, a place where she hopes ‘the fabric of our lives and rhythm of our days would be different’.

It is an idyllic, optimistic premise that ties into the mythos of the American West as being a place where people can reinvent themselves. In the opening pages of Surrender — which won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize — she describes the view from her bedroom window suddenly becoming dominated by ‘mountains and sky and deer looking in’. ‘Montana strikes the newcomer as a sort of Eden.’

Beneath the surface of this Eden, however, the reality is more complex. Run-off from copper mining has left rivers biologically sterile; global warming has caused glaciers to melt; and a million acres of forest are being destroyed by wildfires. In Pocock’s evocative descriptions of these events, her grief is palpable. The fires leave behind ‘a blasted, barren landscape of blackened trees’. At a polluted creek, ‘water the colour of split peas buries standing trees half way up their trunks’.

There is the sense that, in these descriptions of lifeless landscapes, Pocock is also grappling with the menopausal changes within her own body. Perhaps because of this parallel, her rendering of the American West is often framed in a manner both physical and deeply personal. She feels the seasons ‘swinging off their axis, in [her] body’, as she ‘drowns in news of poisoned rivers and melting glaciers’.