The heavens are falling

The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre, and Clare Morrall’s astute and vigorously imagined novel follows on from the best of them, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and (most recently)Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship.

Intriguingly, the future that Morrall imagines very much resembles the past. Following 50 years of climate catastrophe, and the spread of the population-depleting Hoffman’s disease, the only hope for humanity’s survival is to find ways of ‘living with the weather’, or learning ‘skills that don’t depend on failing technology’. Her heroine, the 22-year-old Roza Polanski, ekes out an existence with her family in a blighted Birmingham tower block, a structure periodically surrounded by flood water. Only when the waters recede can she cycle to the decaying Birmingham Art Gallery; fossil fuels having long since been exhausted. There, the broken statue of a 19th-century economist, uprooted from its plinth, suggests that financial collapse might have contributed to the parlous state of the UK, though this is never fully explored.