In her 2023 novel The Coral Bones, EJ Swift created a tapestry of interwoven timelines – past, present and future – to shed light upon the origins of the climate crisis and to point towards possible approaches to surviving the disaster. Where such a summary might offer a general outline of what the book is about, it cannot begin to convey the lyrical qualities and human sensibilities of Swift’s writing. Right from the beginning, in her early ‘Osiris’ trilogy, Swift has revealed herself as a writer whose personal commitment to the themes and issues that drive her fiction is equalled by her ability to tell powerfully affecting stories of individual lives. Her new novel, out today, is not only her best to date. It reads for me also as a culmination of the work Swift has produced so far, a jumping-off point for what she is sure to achieve in the future.
When There Are Wolves Again is a novel of dual timelines that will eventually converge. Hester is born in 1986, on the day of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. As a result, she has always experienced a fascination, even a connection with the place and when as a documentary film maker she finally visits the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the early 2020s, that connection is deepened. Returning to the UK, she brings with her a dog-wolf hybrid, a puppy she names Lux. The bond she forms with this wild-born creature will come to be a symbol of a wider interconnectedness between humans and nature.
Lucy is born in London thirty years later. As her parents struggle with work pressures during the COVID pandemic, Lucy spends an increasing amount of time with her grandparents, and it is from her grandmother in particular that she begins to learn about the natural world, and the environmental crisis that is largely being ignored by those in power. As Lucy grows to adulthood, the fight to protect the planet’s ecosystems becomes her primary concern, her reason for being. Together with other activists, she becomes part of a growning environmentalist movement, recognising that protest is only the first step in effecting change.
Hester’s own understanding of the land – she grows up on a farm in rural Somerset – is challenged when the community she is a part of fails to grasp the necessity of making changes to their way of working. Estranged from her traditionalist brother, she becomes determined instead to document our present moment and the conflicts it presents. Though her response to the climate crisis is very different from Lucy’s, Hester’s commitment to raising awareness is equally urgent. It seems inevitable that the paths of these two women will eventually cross.
There has been an increasing amount of discussion around the nature of eco-fiction. that the climate crisis has too frequently been used as yet another initiatior of end-times catastrophe or political dystopia. Post-apocalyptic novels though are a genre in their own right, a staple of science fiction for more than a hundred years and doubtless for even more time to come. They can also be an interesting arena for literary experiment – Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker or Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria are just two examples of how eco-disaster can be a disruptor in more than one sense. A new wave of eco-fiction – a recent tranche of novels that examine the climate crisis as it is currently unfolding and present if not solutions then what might be called proactive responses – sits alongside the traditional disaster novel not as a riposte but as a whole other way of thinking. These novels are different – not so much science fiction as social realism – because their aims and priorities are different. Alongside novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Julia Armfield’s Private Rites and Sarah Hall’s Helm, When There Are Wolves Again is in the vanguard of this movement.
I loved Swift’s novel The Coral Bones, but for me, Wolves is even better. The fact that it takes place here, in Britain, amongst landscapes and communities that are deeply familiar and deeply loved makes this poetic, passionate and incredibly thoughtful novel twice as hard-hitting. Swift’s insights are considered, plausible, and in the end affirmatory. Her writing, tied indivisibily as it is to her personal convictions, goes from strength to strength.