In my review of Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets, I mentioned the off-putting length of the narrative.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new world champion.
The Deluge by Stephen Markley clocks in at about 900 pages and you've really gotta want it to make your way through. This is a Game of Thrones-length novel that's not for the faint of heart.
Told by various characters in different points of view (Markley employs all three persons: first-person, third-person, and yes, second-person POV), this sprawling eco thriller spans decades and may just reduce you to a yammering headcase who rocks himself in the corner of a room.
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| Image via Indianapolis Public Library |
To put it simply, the book addresses climate change/global warming, the various ways in which humanity failed to address it, and the grim fallout from that inaction. The outlook is bleak, the consequences maddening, and the parallels to current events rather...distressing.
We follow the founder of a radical environmental movement who doesn't care about the political leanings of her allies as long as they support her climate agenda (most of her chapters are told in first-person through her partner); the leader of an even more radical group of ecoterrorists determined to destroy oil and electrical companies; a genius-level analytics guru whose algorithms and computer models drive government policy; a scientist whose disturbing visions about climate disaster spur him to write a widely read book that draws as much scorn as acclaim for its solutions; an advertising executive whose romantic run-in with an actor has unexpected consequences years later as she grapples with her personal life and professional legacy; and a Midwestern junkie whose once carefree life leads to despondency, addiction, recovery, religious conversion, prison, and unrelenting bleakness.
Packed with real-world science (or at least convincing enough science in the vein of Michael Crichton), politics, and economics, the ambition of this novel is stunning. While character-driven chapters fuel the narrative, the book has a few interstitials that include fake news articles (such as a profile of environmental activist Kate Morris from Rolling Stone), interview transcripts, and news reports. These small touches (including the occasional roundup of notable headlines) add some additional realism to the book.
The Deluge juggles multiple characters and themes. Some chapters are told in first person through the perspective of a single character. Others are limited third-person while some take the omniscient third-person viewpoint. Chapters featuring "Keeper," an Ohio junkie, take a second-person approach, putting the reader in that character's mind by turning the reader into that character (a non-book example for context: "You go to the store. You feel the bitterly cold air against your face as you slam the door shut on your beat-up, rusted-out Chevy Equinox"). Chapters from the analytics guru are told through executive summaries and reports, with these documents including the character's inner thoughts and narrative.
Despite its length, complexity, and generally bleak tone, it's a page turner. For me, this was for two reasons: the narrative was compelling and I was racing against the clock to make sure I finished the dang thing before I had to return it to the library. Digital loans from the Indianapolis Public Library last for 21 days, and I had about 10 days to read The Deluge before it had to go back (I could renew it for another 21 days if needed).
I had no idea about the length until I first opened the book, which is ironic since The Deluge is most famous for being an incredibly long read.
A lot of readers will quit--I almost did--because the book is a slog through the first 200 pages or so. Characters rarely intersect, the POV shifts are jarring, and I felt like I was waiting for something to happen. Instead, I was spending time with these disparate characters in formative points of their lives. It all pays off eventually, but, man, it's an investment.
In writing and publishing, I've learned about the importance of the first pages and building narrative momentum. I've also been told the importance of word count and that novels with word counts hovering in the hundreds of thousands are non-starters. The Deluge shatters these rules.
Were I to put on my editorial hat, I feel like there's plenty that could be cut from the narrative. I read in some interviews that Markley worked on the book for about a decade and had already cut six or so point-of-view characters.
He could have gone further.
The Keeper chapters, with their janky second-person presentation, are far removed from the rest of the book. I would have cut them, even though they show the scourge of climate change and economic collapse through the eyes of someone who has no elevated standing in society (and even though, in the end, they do intersect with the main narrative). The character goes through an interesting journey, but he's not truly engaging until his final chapter.
In a book this long, with so many characters, slogging through several chapters waiting for a character to finally get interesting frustrated me.
Eco activist Kate Morris could've also used some refinement. At few points in this book does she act or talk like a real person. She's supposed to be edgy, cool, and unpredictable (her nickname is "Kate Chaos"), but she came off to this reader as an eye-rolling attention hound. Her abject cruelty to those around her and her insatiable lust conflict with her stated goal of pursuing environmental reform without compromise. There is no nuance in her.
I realize that's probably the point (and people are allowed to have contradictions--that's why we're people!), but she could've been cranked down from 22 to 11. She's just too unbelievable as a character, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Eco-Warrior Mary Sue Relationship Battering Ram.
That's probably by design. We never get into her head (with the exception of a third-person chapter more than midway through the book), so we only view her how other characters and the media view her. She's crucial to the book, both from a narrative and philosophical standpoint. I'm not asking for her to be toned down or sanded down to wholesomeness--I felt she lacked authenticity that would have made her more emotionally engaging.
Then again, she inspires a worldwide movement and gets her own statue. Who am I to judge?
The book reveals some interesting narrative concepts near the end. As the novel reaches its conclusion, we learn that some of the chapters were "written" by artificial intelligence. Tony Pietrus, a scientist who is introduced early in the book, is succumbing to cancer and asked to write his memoirs. In failing health and frail, he shares stories with an A.I. that analyzes his style and transforms his stories into a full book that mimics his tone and style.
Along those same lines, the chapters about an aging ecoterrorist named Shane are an analytical reconstruction of the bits of information A.I. modeling is able to learn about her. These parts of the book are annotated with asides (brief biological sketches of other characters, summaries of events, briefs about a contemporaneous character's state of mind or background). No one ever learned her true identity because she covered her digital tracks so well.
The chapter that briefly puts us in the mindspace of Kate Morris? That is revealed to be an analytical reconstruction of a key, world-shattering event (an environmentalist-led occupation/shutdown of Washington, D.C., that ends in terror and tragedy). That chapter, in the book's world, is a synthesis of many different sources fed into an A.I. to reconstruct the terrible events of those days and turn them into a cohesive narrative. Thus, even when readers see the world from Morris' point of view, they're not really seeing it. It's a construct.
For some readers, the world of The Deluge may be all too real. For example, through years of lobbying and pressure campaigns, Morris and a coalition of groups get the government onboard with a revolutionary bill focused on the climate crisis. While it has some compromises, it is a groundbreaking measure and a critical first step. It passes in the House, but once it makes it to the Senate, most of those environmental safeguards are stripped away from the bill, which essentially transforms the United States into a surveillance state.
The hope of real change turns into a juiced-up Patriot Act as the government becomes obsessed with rooting out "insurgent" environmental fanatics, scientists, and ecoterrorists. Given how screwed up today's Washington is, it's far too easy to see something like that happening within the next year (or maybe next week).
Other unsettling realities of this novel's world: climate change has so thoroughly damaged Earth that storms are constant and terrifying; global warming has permanently altered our ecological systems and the food chain, leading to the extinction of many species; the nation's capital must be relocated further inland to Cleveland, Ohio, because D.C. is inundated with frequent flooding events that lead to shutdowns; a failed actor becomes a national figure who cultivates a significant right-wing following and almost becomes president; the dream of Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse is realized, not through Meta itself, but through a different company that crafts virtual reality worlds (stylized as "worldes" in the book's nomenclature) that everyone relies on for news, entertainment, and escape; and the world's largest companies and carbon contributors refuse to acknowledge their role in the global crisis, agreeing only to change their ways if they're indemnified against the damage they were directly responsible for causing.
While this review hasn't turned into The Deluge, it has turned into a deluge. I think anyone who's read the book will agree that it's a lot to wrap your head around. It's not easy to summarize or critique a book that follows so many characters over so many years (again, the narrative unfolds across decades) and covers a multitude of complex philosophical, scientific, and political concepts.
Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts about this book. It's one that will stick with me for a long time as it grapples with a looming crisis that parallels our current reality. It is an admirable achievement despite some of its flaws, and if you can stomach it, I recommend it.
