This novella, written for COP26, was published exclusively in German as ‘Das Jahr des Dugong.’ This is the original English text available as a Kindle book.
The novella tells the story of Toby Markham, a wealthy businessman, who wakes up many years after a near fatal accident to find himself in court charged with the worst offences ever brought to trial. A cautionary tale about human responsibility, climate change, extinction, and a pangolin. Compulsory reading for anyone concerned about the future of Planet Earth.
On first glance at the title one might ask, What is a dugong?
Well Wikipedia tells us here but the key line is that this aquatic mammal is listed as “a species vulnerable to extinction” due to anthropogenic (man made) reasons like “fishing-related fatalities, habitat degradation, and [illegal] hunting (for its meat and oil).” Throw in “a long lifespan of 70 years or more and slow rate of reproduction” and the “dugong is especially vulnerable to extinction.”
On second glance one might ask, why did it get a year named after it in this compelling and thought provoking novella?
Well, in the far future timeline of this split timeline story the many fears of Extinction Rebellion have come to pass with countless species made extinct by anthropogenic causes – think of the dodo and the passenger pigeon writ hundreds of thousands of times over.
In the future where our protagnist Toby Markham wakes up, the names of these lost creatures are all that remain. The drastically diminished and massively displaced remnant of humanity honour those lost creatures by taking their names as personal names as well as names of the years of reckoning. But the name is more than just an honorific, it brings a responsibility too. Markham’s defence lawyer Sunda Pangolin is committed to learning and knowing all she can about the dead species whose name she carries – bearing witness to what once lived.
This is of course a climate change book, and climate change has many aspects beyond the simple raising of sea levels. In resurrecting his protagonist from a post-accident cryogenic suspension, Ironmonger is able to straddle the two ends of the climate crisis’s timeline. There is the 2019 point of inflexion where wealthy hedge fund manager Toby Markham argues against embracing a green investment agenda. His reasoning is that the fund will just lose the custom of wealthy clients who want to make money and will flee to competitor investment management firms. Besides, Markham argues that managing climate change is the responsibility of governments, not investment funds.
The Markham of 2019 is not particularly likeable, sustained by inherited wealth and the kind of constantly growing income of the rentier class, he enjoys hedonistic pleasures, idleness and the sexual favours of women young enough to be his daughter. He is not oblivious to the climate crisis, but just doesn’t see it as his problem.
“I’m all for saving the planet. I just don’t want to be the guy who pays for it.”
The Toby of the Year of the Dugong is defrosted(!) by a shrunken civilisation still feeling its way out of the dark ages with limited electricity and none of the medical advances that the Toby’s fellow cryogenically suspended near-death ultra-wealthy had hoped would cure the conditions they were dying from.
“That must have been galling,” Toby said. “To be resurrected only to be told that you’re still about to die.”
Pangolin nodded. “Not many of them took the news well,” she agreed. “But we learned a lot.”
What they learned was enough to safely if painfully resurrect Toby so he could stand trial for the crimes of terracide and genocide. If convicted he faces a mandatory sentence of a “slow death” that makes poor William Wallace’s fate look like a trip to Dignitas.
In our own social and political era, the climate crisis has shifted along a continuum of concern from being a problem of ‘science and technology’, through one of ‘communication’ to one of willful criminality. The deliberate misinformation and political interference is soul destroying to watch. If the tobacco industry had lobbied has hard and as deceitfully as the Fossil Fuel industry has we would have doctors prescribing cigarettes to eight year olds as a cure for asthma – it really is that fecking bad!
So I do like to see climate change books which look at the crisis from the angle of criminality and culpability. For example there is Jon Raymond’s Denial which I reviewed for the fantasy-hive here which imagined a Nuremberg style set of ‘Toronto trials’ in 2030 when oil executives and complicit politicians were put in trial for ‘crimes against life’. There is also Ross Clark’s climate denier’s salvo The Denial which suggests that the climate crisis is grossly exaggerated and has become a cult that demonises ‘sensible’ people, elevates children to positions of power while also traumatising them with ‘fear-babe’ talk of disaster. (I really take issue with the book here .) Like Ironmonger, Clark has his protagonist – Bryan Geavis – put on trial before a jury of younger/future generations (Geavis is accused of the ‘crime’ of denying climate change). However, Geavis – as a cipher on which Ross scrawls climate denial talking points – is inevitably less capable of change and self-realisation than Markham.
As the 2019 Markham hears two different investment strategy proposals, Ironmonger has plenty of scope to deliver some climate home truths, particularly about the big investors in hedge funds.
“…They fly hundreds of times a year. They have big yachts. They drive heavy SUVs. They own Bitcoins” Romily seemed to spit out this word. “Bitcoins. An imaginary currency that the world really doesn’t need. We often encourage our clients to buy bitcoins. We do. And yet the carbon released from power stations every year purely to support the computers that mine bitcoins is greater than the carbon released from one million transatlantic flights every year.”
Although Ironmonger wrote this book back in 2019, the issue of bitcoins seems particularly resonant given the way Bitcoin billionaires are flocking to fund the climate change denying, fossil fuel friendly pile of criminality, hate and misinformation that is Farage’s Reform party (aka an undemocratic Ltd company under a CEO dictatorship in which members have no voting power). Let’s not forget too that bitcoin in all its untraceable glory is a key route through which William Rees Mogg’s vision of the ‘Sovereign Individual’ can finally be realised. With bitcoin the ultra-wealthy can finally free themselves from the tedious trappings of civilised states – things like taxation, accountability and contributing to a society that helps everyone. They can continue their favourite hobby of slagging a country off from the well heeled comfort of a Monaco residence where they are definitely not ‘economic migrants’ but are just ‘expats’. (Jim Ratcliffe take note!)
To be fair to Toby, expat as he was in 2019, he is at least apathetic, rather than actively adversarial towards the efforts of people trying to address the crisis that end stage capitalism is so definitely fuelling. Indeed Ironmonger prefaces his book with a surprising quote from no less an advocate than Greta Thunberg.
“At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else.”
And therein lies the point, that still fuels so much apathy as the UK government still refuses to publish the full unredacted report of its joint security chiefs about the catastrophic impact looming over us. When so much of the advice is – as Toby puts it – “To shut up and let the people in power sort it out for us” then it is difficult to stand up and demand action. (Particularly when even peaceful climate action is criminalised, while right-wing balaclava-clad foreign-funded racists can walk the streets utterly unimpeded.)
So yeah, a book that allows our children’s future to put our present on trial for the crime of standing by while the world burned is always going to float my boat. As various commentators on social media have already said
“I don’t want to wait for history to judge them. I want to judge them now, with judges.”
But for all the popping candy of climate indignation (ranting) that The Year of The Dugong sets off for me, Ironmonger’s first duty as a novelist is to tell a good story with compelling characters and he delivers on that score.
Toby is not entirely irredeemable. The Toby of 2019 has a passion for wildlife photography, for seeing and capturing the beauty in all the rich variety of animal life that we share planet Earth with. That experience offers a point of connection with that reduced future scrap of humanity who only know those animals as relics in the pages of library books. And with connection comes the chance of personal growth and redemption.
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