Bewilderment
By Richard Powers
Hutchinson/Paperback/278 pages/$30.94/Available here
4 out of 5
Acclaimed eco-fiction author Richard Powers, 64, has won praise for his ability to alchemise urgent science and environment issues into narratives that are accessible to the common everyday reader.
His previous novel The Overstory (2018), which cast a spotlight on deforestation, clinched the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He returns to the Booker shortlist with his 13th novel, Bewilderment.
It is ostensibly set in a dystopian future with the world teetering on the brink over climate change as populist, profit-minded politicians pursue short-term industry gains and ignore long-term green issues.
Or perhaps the future is now. Powers was obviously inspired by current affairs, with characters based on young Swedish green activist Greta Thunberg and former United States president Donald Trump, a climate change denialist.
Powers’ appeal for empathy centres on the Byrne family, whose routine night-time prayer goes: “May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering.”
Precocious, troubled child Robin, on the cusp of turning 10, is incapable of hurting an insect. This kindness to creatures is matched by an uncontrollable rage aimed at human beings.
His animal rights activist mother Alyssa died in a car accident to avoid hitting an endangered opossum, while his astro-biologist father Theo is focused on finding extraterrestial life.
Theo’s search juxtaposes imagined otherworlds against earth’s myriad problems. Powers writes: “In the face of the world’s most basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering.”
Bewilderment, while an important read, is let down by its mawkishness. Jealousy rears its head, an experimental neuro-feedback treatment resurrects the brain waves of the dead, and a scientist is all too quick to dismiss proven medical science.
Still, it serves as a timely polemic against climate recklessness and a cri de coeur against irreversible damage to the earth’s fragile ecosystems.
If you like this, read: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Perennial, 2020, $19.80, available here). Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, Cook’s debut novel explores a world so ravaged by climate change that some of its inhabitants take to living a nomadic life in the wild.