by Bill Bryson
Of course each generation is assailed by different collective fears and convictions, some validated by events, others not, some with a strong scientific basis, others religious or political. In his two brilliant studies The Pursuit of the Millennium and Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, Norman Cohn traced the recurrence of ‘millenarian’ cults from the ancient world to the sixteenth century. More recently John Gray in Black Mass echoed Cohn’s observation that mid-twentieth-century movements like Communism and Nazism also counted on the coming death of the old order. A 1704 letter by Isaac Newton predicting, on skimpy biblical ‘evidence’, that the world would end in 2060, made news in the twenty-first century partly because it was put on show in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the February 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq when, as Stephen D. Snoblen has pointed out, apocalyptic fears were already rife. In the nineteenth century, British people’s fears of progress often focused on the building of the railways, seen as heralding social revolution, horrifying accidents, ‘pollution, destruction, disaster and danger’, as Ralph Harrington puts it in his article ‘The Neuroses of the Railway’; writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to Charles Dickens were excited by railway terrors; yet in the twenty-first century, we tend to see trains as a low-stress, less polluting alternative to planes and cars. Medical doomsday scenarios have proved equally hard to call: AIDS caused, and still causes, a terrible toll of deaths, but has not quite become the all-consuming plague that at one time seemed to threaten us, and nor, so far, have BSE or ‘Bird Flu’.
Some collective fears, though, have proved well founded. The 1930s in Europe were marked by fear of totalitarianism; in September 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland. Other fears continue to stalk us. The cold war and the nuclear arms race brought the shadow of atomic Armageddon. The collapse of the Soviet Union moved it further away, but nuclear proliferation has continued and the famous clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is still, in 2009, set at five minutes to midnight. In the 1980s and 1990s, laymen got their first glimmer of the global warming that has grown into the pervasive dread of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the thing that most enduringly gives a shape to that vague terror of the end of the world that each generation carries with it from childhood. (‘Is it the end of the world?’ I asked my mother, aged seven, after the head teacher of our tiny village school told us, during the Suez Crisis, that ‘the next few days will decide whether or not the world will go to war’. ‘Is it the end of the world?’ my teenage daughter asked me, after the Twin Towers fell on 11 September 2001.)
We have just crossed the bar between two millennia and seen a swell of apocalyptic thinking, with the ‘Year 2K Bug’ cresting the wave. Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News points up the discrepancy between the chaos predicted to follow the digit-change in computers – ‘A date with disaster’, Washington Post, ‘The day the world crashes’, Newsweek – and the actual events: a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour, and a Swansea businessman thought his computer had blown up, only to discover that a mouse had spread droppings on his circuit board. Book titles of the 1990s and early 2000s predicted The End of Faith, The End of Certainty and The End of History; The End of Food (two books within two years, in 2006 by F. Pawlick, in 2008 by Paul Roberts), The End of Oil and The End of Fashion, followed by The End of the Alphabet, The End of America and The End of Science, and finally The End of Days and The End of Time.
But texts are more complex than titles. Though Paul Roberts’ The End of Food raises the frightening prospect of ‘a perfect storm of food-related calamities’ in a globally warmed world, he also suggests practical ways of holding it off: humans might successfully change industrial-scale production, stop demanding ultra-cheap food, use natural fertilisers and practise water conservation. Mark Lynas’ book Six Degrees, whose colourful blurb prefaces this essay and whose paperback cover shows Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament being neatly toppled by a tidal wave, in fact examines a range of scenarios for global warming, between one degree and six degrees Celsius, and ends with a chapter of suggestions about how his readers can best avoid the worst of them. Fears examined often become less fearful.
Literary writers trying to make sense of our place in history tend to be drawn back constantly to the experience of the present and the physical textures and details we know and love. Stuck in the blank and almost unendurable elevator of time in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, cult novelist Haruki Murakami metaphorically opens the doors into two alternative universes, both threatened, both situated on the other side of a puzzling schism in history, both marked by a recurrent Arcadian longing for a lost daylight world of physical beauty. More recently acclaimed memoirist Diana Athill published Towards the End, her lucid account of why life, however diminished, is still worth living at ninety. Her chosen title both alludes to the end and pushes it away, suspending us in a short but valuable present, the time she has left. She buys and plants a tiny tree-fern even though she knows she will never see it become a tree: the experience of watching it grow is enough.
Regular science fiction and mainstream writers from Mary Shelley onwards have been attracted to the end of the world; it offers drama, heightened emotions and vivid imagery. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Brian Aldiss, Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O’Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux, among many other novelists, have imagined human life surviving (or sometimes dying) in the grip of great disasters. The final effect of most of these narratives is to make the reader lay down the book with a sense of relief that human civilisation outside its pages still endures. Whether intentionally or not, these books refresh our love of life. But Dr Lee Marsden at the University of East Anglia has drawn my attention to a diametrically opposed trend in the work of Tim Peretti, Tim La Haye, Jerry Jenkins and other figures from the Christian evangelical Right in the USA who are writing an extraordinary sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction that sells in hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions, and is read as literal truth by many of the faithful. These books are based on the premise that we are already living in the ‘end times’ and can expect ‘tribulation, war, famine and pestilence’ as a necessary prelude to the ecstasy of the second coming and establishment of Christ’s rule on Earth.
Some of my own novels have been described as apocalyptic: my second, The Burning Book, written at the apogee of nuclear fears in 1981, ended with nuclear war; two others, Where Are the Snows and The Ice People, featured runaway climate change; and The Flood contains an asteroid strike and a tsunami. But at a conscious level, my strategy is to use the threat of apocalypse to re-focus attention on the short-term miracle of what we have, this relatively peaceful and temperate present where the acts of reading and writing are possible. So in The Burning Book and The Flood there are, essentially, ‘double endings’. I want to offer my readers an active choice. The Burning Book ends with all-out nuclear war between America and Russia – but then the narrator steps back, and reminds us that at the time of reading nuclear war is still a fiction. ‘Waking again from the book you look out of the window at stillness. The sunlight on the table lying pale and still as peace.’ The last section of the book is called ‘Against ending’, and its final phrases are ‘always beginning again, beginning against ending’. The Flood uses a similar strategy to The Burning Book. The first draft was completed in December 2002, in the long run-up to the 2003 war on Iraq. The people of a city in an imaginary universe are trying to go about their business as usual even though it has been raining for months and the streets are slowly disappearing under the flood waters. President Bare is preoccupied with planning a war against an Islamic country: apocalyptic religion flourishes at home, especially among the poor. The narrative ends with a final tsunami that people have done nothing to prevent. But there’s also an epilogue set in the book’s first real, named place, Kew Gardens, where the flood has not yet happened.
Everyone is there, alive, dancing in their moment, together with the foxes and starlings who are also part of the cast of my dreamed city. The Flood’s relationship to subsequent real-life history turned out to be quite unlike The Burning Book’s. Britain and America did wage war against an Islamic country, six weeks after I finished the second draft of the novel: a great tsunami did strike Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India the Christmas after The Flood was published. Kew Gardens does survive, in real life as it does in metaphor, protecting genetic diversity from all over the world against ending, a vivid botanical carnival of the living moment. I think I wanted to say ‘Don’t take it all for granted.’
Yet that can’t be the whole story. Something in me must be drawn towards disaster. Standing on the cliff edge at Beachy Head in late golden afternoon sunlight, the green of the grass at my feet is glorious, the rocks very far below are white and small as crumbs, the tiny lighthouse is a red-and-white painted toy in front of the sea’s crawling glitter, my stomach feels hollow at the brief mile of empty air ahead – yet I like to look, and I am definitely pulled forward towards nothingness before I resolutely pull back and head home across the golden-green slope with its fathers and children flying kites, its jumping dogs, its beautiful restored everydayness.
II
Why do people (or some part of their psyches) long for an ending? Perhaps because continuing down the same path, struggling always to do better, is exhausting and sometimes discouraging, though it is the normal lot of most human beings. Imagining instead a change of state, an abrupt cut-off, offers at least an end to suffering. The great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser expressed this longing beautifully in The Faerie Queen:
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life doth greatly please.
Perhaps also, in stressful times, people start to crave an ending because its arrival would spare them from the fear of it, and fear, a dynamic emotion alerting us that things are about to get worse, is something human beings find peculiarly hard to tolerate. When fear is at its worst, death can start to beckon, slyly whispering that it would be a relief. Readers of thrillers and crime novels, unable to bear the waiting, sometimes skip to the end to know the worst.
I think some individuals, whether artists or scientists or neither, feel the pull of the void more than others. Why should this be? In my own case, I could choose as a defining moment the one in my village school when the head, Mr Norris, perhaps feeling afraid himself or lonely in the midst of us runny-nosed, inarticulate children of all ages from six to eleven, lumped together in one class, said those words about the world going to war that terrified me for months and years afterwards, so that every plane that flew overhead seemed to me the beginning of the end. Yet so far as I know, none of the other children at Watersfield village school became apocalyptic novelists. I would probably have to go back beyond that day to some prior experience of fear to say why I listened to Mr Norris’ words with such a painful sense of attunement and recognition: I might also posit some quirk in my own particular neurochemical makeup. Be that as it may, twenty-five years later I did not agree with the two eager psycho-analysts, one of them, as it happened, a dear friend of mine, who turned an agreeable dinner into a battle-ground by trying to convince me that I had written The Burning Book as an expression of my infantile desire to destroy the whole world: this helpful interpretation was never going to persuade a card-carrying CND member. But perhaps they were on to something.
I do see some analogy between how I deal with the fear of destruction and how some victims of violence become violent themselves, in order at any rate to play an active rather than a passive role in what is unbearable. It’s an attempt to regain a measure of control. When I am writing a story it is I who decide whether the war happens or the tsunami strikes; facing up to these possibilities is arduous and disturbing, yet it is a livelier experience than just waiting in anxiety on the margins of life. Using my role as writer to produce The Flood was definitely my way of dealing with my fear and anger about the impending war on Iraq. I wonder if it is the same for scientists working on one facet or other of global warming, or writing about it? Are they putting superficially negative emotions like worry and apprehension to practical use, and so experiencing a kind of victory over circumstance? At the beginning of this chapter I talked about the changing communal fears of human societies and said that only some of them were validated by subsequent events, but I did not add that this is sometimes because fear is a force for good, inspiring effective action. Many computer scientists would argue, contra Paul Davies, that the non-materialising of the Y2K Bug was in fact a validation of the updates they designed. The traits of intellectuals and activists who speculate about disaster – far-sightedess, susceptibility to fear and willingness to tolerate unpalatable facts and the sadness they produce – have not been selected out by evolution, so perhaps they have often enough been thought useful by human beings living in difficult times.
And yet it doesn’t make for popularity. I work in these galleys and have dreamed these dreams yet my own heart sinks when I see a title like Lynas’ Six Degrees or even the great James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, with the almost comic-book salaciousness of the disaster scene on its front cover. Part of me is repelled by what can seem like gloating. Part of me starts to mutter, ‘You don’t know the living world is going to be wrecked. It isn’t yet. You’re not certain. All this is just extrapolation. Don’t wish what we have away.’ Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree. We too prefer to have fun in the present: we prefer, most of the time, not to think about danger. And yet we cannot for long suppress our half-fearful, half-excited knowledge that we are living at this peculiar and possibly critical point in human history, when, as Martin Rees reminds us, ‘within fifty years, little more than one hundredth of a millionth of Earth’s age, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere … [has begun] to rise anomalously fast’, an ‘unprecedented spasm … seemingly occurring with runaway speed’. How are we to live in such anxious times? How to strike a balance between, on the one hand, paying attention to scientific or literary models of possible futures that can draw us ever deeper into possible disaster, and on the other respecting and learning from the quieter practice of, say, a naturalist and ecologist like C.S. Elton, who spent twenty years watching and recording the rhythms and cycles of Wytham Wood? Or a writer like Diana Athill, who, like Elton, focuses her intelligence on what is? Can we learn from Buddhists and lyric poets how to live joyfully in the present at the same time as listening to climate scientists modelling disaster? How often can we afford to stare over the edge of the cliff?
III
Some aspects of ending have a special meaning for the act of writing, perhaps in fiction most of all. A novel is nothing without an ending. In some respects, the end is the most important part. It is vital that the ending should be the right one though; that it satisfies and resolves, and is planned and prepared for. Most ends of human lives, by contrast, are messy, a chapter of missed connections and unwished for accidents, as Julian Barnes’ account of his mother’s and father’s deaths in Nothing to be Frightened of elegantly shows. Endings in real life never really end. There are always aftermaths and unintended consequences. But books are places of intended consequences. Fictional ends rest safe in the knowledge that they are final.
Unlike endings in real life, the endings of books can be borne. It is part of the author’s job to make the ending bearable for the reader: to help them say goodbye. And in that act, in an ending properly brought off, we help the reader return to life. The end of a good book may make a reader sad, but it is very far from being a death. Whether sad or happy, the ending of a book should be a complex form of consolation. In this world, the invented one, things can end as they were meant to, and in that sense, well. That is one reason why mortal human animals tell stories.
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sp; There is another sense of ‘end’ in the OED on which Paul Muldoon plays in his collected Oxford Lectures on Poetry, The End of the Poem: ‘the object for which a thing exists; the purpose for which it is designed or instigated’. The narratives in novels do progress inexorably towards the ending. Once arrived there, the reader should be able to look back and see the novel’s ‘end’ in Muldoon’s sense: its meaning, or meanings, its purpose. From that viewpoint, everything in the novel should seem both necessary and inevitable. In one sense the ending is also the point of the book.
And this is where life is so very different. Much of Julian Barnes’ book about his fear of death centres on his desire not to be caught off guard and outflanked by the unexpected, at the wrong time, with a book unfinished. Nothing to be Frightened of reads like his extended attempt in turn to out-think and anticipate death, ‘the ruffian on the stair’, finally winning at least the aesthetic battle by weaving the unpredictable terror into the smooth texture of his own self-penned story.