Catton

The category of climate fiction, or cli-fi, arose in this millennium, but several older works of fiction have tackled the subject of climate change and its effects. Prescient examples include JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Ursula K Le Guin’s The New Atlantis (1975). Trees in the Surrealist Garden in Hamilton Gardens, New Zealand. (Shutterstock) 432pp; Granta Books (Granta Books) In their time, these works might have sounded far-fetched or futuristic, but contemporary cli-fi often feels…

In a literary marketplace that sometimes seems oversupplied with novels about brittle intellectuals feeling alienated from their emotions, or twentysomethings grinding axes about their exes, there is the wonder of Eleanor Catton: a novelist of lavish technical gifts who addresses herself to the world, broadly and richly conceived.Catton’s first novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal, was a small miracle. Leaping acrobatically between fictional and metafictional modes, it tells the story of a secondary-school scandal (male teacher,…

In his great critical work The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode wrote about the end-directedness of fiction, the way that novels rehearse and forestall their endings – a process he called peripeteia. One thing he doesn’t discuss in that book is what happens when an ending entirely alters your understanding of the text. There are numerous examples of tricksy plot twists – think Fingersmith or Fight Club – but I’m not sure I’ve read a novel whose ending so brilliantly and brutally changes our perception of what has gone…

It has been 10 years since Eleanor Catton became, at 28, the youngest writer to be awarded the Booker prize. The Luminaries, a Victorian mystery set during the New Zealand gold rush, was the longest book to win in the prize’s history and made her only the second New Zealand writer to have done so, after Keri Hulme. Since then, she has adapted it for the BBC and written a screenplay for Emma (both of which aired in 2020), got married and had a baby. But it has taken her a long time to get back to fiction, she says, when I…