In his time, Douglas Adams, best known for writing The Hitchhikers‘ Guide to the Galaxy, was the possessor of an authorial voice.

Distinctive in its unabashed knowingness deployed in the services of a comfortable kind of Home Counties social satire, it embedded itself in the interior dialogues of a generation of slightly introverted, somewhat bookish adolescents – the kind that might go on to revere The Smiths (but that, of course, is another story). It’s a voice whose whisper seems to ebb and flow in the undercurrents of John Ironmonger’s The Wager And The Bear, a novel which aims to fictionalise the facts of the climate crisis across the plot points of human lives.  

The tide of the Adams-reminiscent tone is at its height at its opening, when the scene is set for what is to follow in establishing the fictional Cornish town of St Piran, named for the county’s patron saint, and a cast of characters colourful enough for Sunday evening drama on the BBC. Better suited, perhaps, to the far-flung and the fantastical than the more down to earth, its whimsical omniscience rankles, and, in drawing attention to its artifice, initially serves to dissuade the reader from any immersion deeper than a first tentative toe of guarded interest in the fast-flowing waters of its narrative.  

Thankfully, once Ironmonger has wound up the clockwork of protagonist and antagonist both – the one, Tom Horsmith, a returning native and student with an in-depth knowledge of undersea volcanoes; the other, Monty Causley, an absentee landlord and MP who is disastrously out of his depth – the shrewd mechanics of the plot (never a strong point with Adams) propel the prose forward with sufficient momentum to shed any passing resemblance to preceding authorial voices.

The propellant, its non-fossil fuel, is the wager of the title, a bet on the local waters rising sufficiently over the course of the following 50 years to drown Causley in his ocean-facing living room. As so often these days, the accelerant is social media which gathers pace once a clip of the bet, casting Causley as being blusteringly out of touch in the face of Horsmith’s more clued-up role as the wind of youthful change, goes viral.  

What follows has the persuasive improbability of a family adventure film, and in the wider screen of the subsequent events the out-sized nature of the central characters comes to appear as both virtue and necessity. As the sweep of the drama extends beyond St Piran’s teatime cosiness to the treacherous ice mass of a melting Greenland, the vivid psychologies of Horsmith and Causley accentuate the gravity of their personal stakes, in effect allowing them to act out the planet’s slow but cumulative precariousness on a human scale, with all the life-and-death urgency that might suggest.  

Indeed, the shifts in tone from the comic to the serious, from the quaint to the derring-do, are, without exception, particularly well-handled. Like a director skilled in keeping audience members on the edge of their seats, Ironmonger evokes the immensity of the ocean in all its ageless indifference to the twinkling of human consciousness and the ferocity with which starvation can drive the untamed wildlife of the Arctic Circle to imperil the species that endangered them. Reading these passages, one can almost discern a stirring orchestral score.  

Crucially, if there is a villain in Ironmonger’s rip-roaring parable, it is not Causley but his special adviser. Nor, as things turn out, is Horsmith ultimately the sole hero of the tale. On this hinges the novel’s achievement, and the proof of Ironmonger’s own distinction. For all that the reader can readily discern the sleeve on which the author wears his heart, the story, largely devoid of one-sided hectoring, is trusted to guide each to the harbour of their own conclusion.  

By Desmond Bullen

 

The Wager and the Bear is available to pre-order now

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