When There Are Wolves Again

I had very much enjoyed The Coral Bones and was very much looking forward to the new EJ Swift novel. I was not disappointed, but there are things to think about.

Like The Coral Bones, When There Are Wolves Again follows the lives of some women: two in this case, rather than three in the previous book. However, there is no great mystery to this book. It is clear from the beginning that the two women will meet at some point and discuss their life stories. The separate narratives are simply giving Swift’s future history from two different viewpoints.

When I say, ‘future history’, I mean very near future. The book begins in 2020 and ends in 2070. That’s a dangerous thing for a science fiction writer to do, because you can easily get caught out by events. A book from a mainstream publisher can easily take two years from delivery to publication these days, and will have been written earlier than that. I don’t know exactly when Swift write this book, but the idea that Reform (herein known as Albion to avoid lawsuits) would have only 3 MPs by 2030 has proved sadly wildly optimistic. Right now they look to be a shoe-in for a majority in the next General Election. I suspect also that the idea that there will be universities in the UK for ordinary young people to go to by 2030 may also prove mistaken.

This is not Swift’s fault. The tides of history are running strongly in the world at the moment and things can change very rapidly. It is not the job of science fiction writers to predict the future, and we should not expect them to be able to.

What we should be looking at instead is the central thesis of the book. I’ll come to that shortly. But first I need to introduce our two main characters.

Hester Moore is the older of the two. She is a documentary film maker. By 2070 she is a very famous one who has been heaped with all the plaudits that the UK can bestow on such people, but we have seen her homeless and starving on the streets of London at the start of her career. She was born on a farm in Somerset but, much to the disappointment of her family, gave up on farming and choose a very different life path.

Lucy Gillard is much younger, only a child when our narrative begins. She becomes a fan of Greta Thunberg and, with the help of her aging Hippy grandparents, becomes an environmental activist. After studying biology at university, she gets involved in the re-wilding movement. This includes time at the near future equivalent of the Greenham Common camp. Lucy, in her own way, becomes as famous as Hester, albeit without the social plaudits.

So where is that story? Well, the film that launches Hester’s career is about the wildlife that lives in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, specifically the pet dogs that were left behind and have gone wild. (Swift uses the spelling, Chornobyl, which appears to be the preferred use by Ukrainians.) This is very real. Nature has adapted to the high levels of radiation around the reactor zone and, in the absence of humans, has thrived.

The novel, through the eyes of Hester and Lucy, chronicles how the ongoing climate catastrophe affects the UK, and what is done about it. We start at Chornobyl because Swift’s thesis is that Nature is superbly adaptable. It can survive the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, and it will survive the massive changes in Earth’s climate that will happen over the next few decades.

Lucy and her friends get to see the Scottish Highlands transformed from privately-owned grouse moors to somewhere that a diversity of wildlife can live. Eventually there need to be predators, which means lynx and wolves.

Hester’s view is much more personal. With rising sea level, farming on the Somerset Levels becomes increasingly uneconomic. There is conflict between the farmers, who expect that Something Should Be Done, and the government, that has very different priorities.

The overall message is very hopeful. Nature may take a beating from climate change, but she will roll with the punches and come back just as strong as ever. Which is lovely. But my problem with such near future environmental SF (see also Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction) is that they elide over what happens to humans. Swift highlights the problems faced by Somerset farmers, but the county is not exclusively agricultural.

Hinkley Point is probably safe. The Office of Nuclear Regulation tells me that the site is 14 metres above sea level. But it will certainly become an island and the safety of the transmission link to the mainland will be an issue. In places such as Taunton, Bridgwater and Glastonbury, new housing is being built on the flood plain. With the new Hinkley C reactor being built, there have been a lot of new homes built in the surrounding villages, most of which will end up under water in Swift’s scenario. What happens to the people who live there? Swift doesn’t tell us.

When There Are Wolves Again is beautifully written, and likely to appeal much more to a mainstream audience than The Coral Bones. I very much enjoyed reading it. But if we are evaluating it as a science fiction novel then I think we should also ask how comprehensively it examines the consequences of the future it describes.

Title: When There Are Wolves Again
By: E J Swift
Publisher: Arcadia
Purchase links:
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Bookshop.org UK
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