Look around: An examination of an eerie present

Review: Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer | Scribner

Writing about the climate crisis is inherently thorny; we hardly have the language to encompass a problem so gargantuan as the end of the world. The conversation around it is future-focused, laden with urgent warnings. But in her beautiful new collection of essays Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss Delia Falconer grounds the conversation in the present. As we hurtle towards catastrophe, the present is a very odd place to be.

In the opening essay — the title piece — Falconer is reflective. With a melancholic tone, she takes a macroscopic look at the losses and changes we’re already seeing. She observes a drastic decline in the number of animals she encounters day to day — flying foxes, frogs, cicadas, stingrays, fish — and contrasts it with the array of life she remembers from earlier years.

She flits between personal observation and reference: the flying foxes’ squabbling outside her apartment no longer keeps her awake at night, and researchers of bogong moths, which once migrated in the billions, can now find almost none in their usual haunts. She paints an uncanny picture, pointing out how the world has already begun to degrade. Climate change isn’t only violent, overwhelming and chaotic, she suggests. It’s also eerie — characterised as much by stillness as it is by disaster.

Falconer deftly illustrates this with a quote from a dumbfounded bogong moth researcher, speaking in 2018: ‘They haven’t declined. They’ve gone.’ The word lands with a thud. ‘Gone’ carries a sense of numb shock — the immediacy and finality of grief. Shifts in rhetoric are powerful, particularly in those who don’t deal in hyperbole, and Falconer leverages this skilfully.

‘Scientists,’ she writes later, ‘are trained to approach data with caution and to avoid colourful and emotional language. Yet when these cautious people express their shock, it feels as if the earth has suddenly fallen away beneath your feet.’ Just like flight attendants become yardsticks for nervous flyers during turbulence (if they aren’t panicking, things must be alright) climate scientists have always been dependable beacons of hope and reason. Lately, they are as terrified as we are.

Though these essays revolve around the climate crisis, they don’t fall under the umbrella of nature writing (which Falconer points out is becoming a less ‘cosy’ genre as observing nature becomes a more melancholy activity). It’s Falconer’s criticism that carries these essays — and her skills as a critic are sharp. She writes a simmering critique of American critic James Wood’s thoughts from 2001 on ‘hysterical realism’ — his name for the phenomenon of then-popular fiction becoming increasingly frantic with ‘obscure and far-flung social knowledge.’ This approach, he argues, makes these stories feel congested with worldly detail, blunting the humanity of their characters.

It’s a delight to read her delicately dismissive takes on Wood (she refers to him as a ‘literary Dr Freud’ at one point) but Falconer doesn’t outright dismiss his argument that this type of writing was “hysterical”. She just disagrees that the hysteria was a distracting writerly flourish with which turn-of-the-century novelists were getting away unchecked. She argues that their hysteria is their reaction to ‘flares of threats so large that they are beyond our ability to comprehend’. Those flares looked like the 9/11 terrorist attacks or images of refugee children in US detention centres. Today they look like the loss of Arctic ice shelves and rampant wildfires — and Covid-19.

I found Falconer’s more compassionate take on hysterical realism refreshing. Here is a literary critic turning her eye to the world around novelists, examining their writing within the context of current events. She broadens the scope of the conversation beyond a complaint about a writerly trend. And she proposes that the trend may be an understandable and commendable response to things that are far more upsetting — and far more pressing. The world is hysteria-inducing. It’s never been more so.

Falconer flexes her criticism muscle once again in ‘The Opposite of Glamour’. She writes about the glamourous, hyper-commercialised world sold to us in films, books, lifestyle television, advertisements and magazines ‘offering a parallel world of infinite abundance.’ Glamour’s opposite here is the struggling, gasping natural world that environmental scientists and a growing number of creatives try so hard to show us. In the world of glamour, Falconer writes:

time exists on a different scale. Nothing is permanent, not even ruin, because things can always be “made over” — properties flipped, ugly ducklings zhoozhed, dream homes located somewhere. In glamour’s alternate reality, surfaces always gleam. Decisions are never moral, but only aesthetic. Nothing is unobtainable, if you can pay enough.

She draws particular attention to the way advertisers, for instance, can and do continue to turn our heads towards the few pockets of abundance still at their disposal. ‘It’s all too easy,’ Falconer continues, ‘to pick up a travel brochure showing people snorkelling on the unbleached corners of the reef, or to watch couples romance each other in teak-lined resort rooms on dating shows, and reassure ourselves that there is still a surplus of natural bounty “out there.”’

The essay is a standout, and not only because of the intelligent dissection of glamour’s sinister side. She also identifies glamour’s shaggy, awkward, complex opposite: Australian creative writing. Although she’s deliberate in not championing creative writing as heroic in contrast.

She observes a growing tendency in the writing world to make grandiose claims of the power of literature to ‘make us better people or offer a “slow” way of seeing a too-fast world.’ But she dismisses it in the same paragraph: ‘I suspect that we’re much better off conceding that writing doesn’t have much power and then getting on with it.’ I let out a sad little laugh here, one that was tinged by indignance and underscored by defeat. I suspect she’s right.

We glimpse Falconer’s considered pessimism about the power of art occasionally, but it surfaces here in full view. It’s an important quandary, particularly as many of us grapple with what role we might play in the fight for life on earth. I have certainly wondered of what use a writer can be there. The answer, Falconer suggests, is: not much.

But she offers an alternative perspective, noting that Australian literature presents a far grittier, more useful reality than the glossy world of glamour. Australian literature’s ‘understanding of abundance as historical, layered, contingent and mutable, is a better place, at least, to start.’

It’s interesting to write about the power of a book in the face of the climate crisis. Particularly when its author has posited that writing doesn’t have the power we might like to think it does. But a better place to start, ultimately, is what these pieces of writing culminate in — and that is their achievement.

There is no shortage of (necessary) writing that aims to galvanise us, or offer us solutions to the climate crisis, or warn us of the future. Amid the whiplash-inducing prevalence of this messaging, Signs and Wonders feels remarkably still. Falconer doesn’t focus so much on the future as she does on the eerie present. She refrains from striving for catastrophic or apocalyptic imagery: what is already here speaks for itself. And there is still beauty here, too. Only now it is tainted by discomfit.

Shame researcher Brené Brown has written about the concept of ‘foreboding joy’: joy that anticipates its own demise. Our relationship with the planet is beginning to feel similar. Is an unexpectedly warm Winter’s day really just a rare treat? Can we still enjoy it knowing it likely has a terrifying cause?

In the simplest sense, these essays are about change. Change is inevitable, disorientating and always existential, regardless of its form or impact. Only now we are experiencing change on a scale so large we can’t entirely understand it.

Climate change is happening. It’s happened, in fact. We don’t live in the same world we did even a decade ago; in Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer helps us come to grips with that. Once we’ve seen the world we now live in and grieved for what we’ve lost, we can, hopefully, find the resolve to look ahead.