Books like The Carbon Diaries 2015

[3.5] It takes a lot to get me reading YA ... like the only realistic fictionalisation (that I know of) of a Second World War-style rationing scheme implemented to curb environmental damage and climate change - a dream policy of plenty of hardcore greens. As I've often thought when reading posts by Marxists on GR over the past couple of years, as well as with this, it's so easy, when imagining big policy shifts you like the idea of, to ignore the fact even if a government was able to implement these ideas that aren't on any electorally relevant parties' manifestos, that there would be plenty of people who would find the transition difficult, or who plain wouldn't like it, and how that might play out in practice (and if you're anything like me, you make exceptions in your head for people you like who'd find whatever-it-is difficult...)Published in 2008, the book is - as you might just have guessed - set in 2015: really a bit too soon for climate-change fuelled weather extremes, and policy and public opinion shifts, described here - but it does mean that the author doesn't have to invent lots of new technologies and youth subcultures wholesale, simply working from what was available in the late 00s, and this gives something of the sense of realism I really wanted from a novel about this scenario.I enjoyed this rather a lot, and appreciated a bit more about why adults might read YA - easy to relax with and fast to read - but I'm surprised more don't get tired of teenage experiences and voices after reading several in a row.I was never expecting Great Literature, but I was disappointed by instances which showed the superficiality of the author's research, things which, these days at least, a few months of reading environmental blogs and news sites, would inform someone about. Obviously, the most likely country to be the first in the world to implement carbon rationing would probably be a Nordic one, or the Netherlands or Germany - but I'm happy to ignore that as an author has to write something of what they know, and I really appreciated seeing this stuff in a relatively familiar environment. (The kind of London estate seen in Zadie Smith novels or Attack the Block, where multicultures live side by side in a way that would baffle a lot of Americans, and long-term council residents mix with middle-class creative families who couldn't afford to buy a house in a traditionally posh area.) Among the things that niggled most were: Characters living in the London Borough of Greenwich start keeping a pig in an urban garden - current regs about foot and mouth would forbid this. But perhaps they might be lifted if the country's policy orientation was different? Some dishwashers and washing machines can use less water than doing the same chores by hand. A couple of characters who are starting a business are into unlimited abundance, The Secret-style money and success self-help books: politicised teenagers like the narrator's friends would be thinking of those as a signficant part of the culture behind the evil, capitalist, resource-overshooting culture that caused climate change, but no criticism or sneering is made at all. Laura, the narrator, is the bassist in a sixth-form punk band, and her bandmates are more heavily into a subculture of enviro-punks, an offshoot of straight edge, than she is: but given the seriousness of the subculture's attitudes and involvement in protest, and the rationing going on, I can't believe its music is still based around electric instruments... I haven't personally worked out how you'd get a punk type attitude and sound out of acoustic instruments, given how they're currently seen, but I think there would have to be something like that. (And would you still dye your hair blue? Or perhaps natural colour without any dyes would be a statement in itself? ... If you were still growing out dye, it would show you weren't that serious, maybe? Would your piercings have to be recycled metal?... Heck I think I want to edit/rewrite this...)As a YA story it zips along but can be a little disappointing at times: Laura's parents trajectory, especially her mum's, owe rather too much to that original teenage diarist of 25 years earlier, Adrian Mole. There are strange lacunae, like the way Laura's bandmates have boyfriends and girlfriends, but it's literally months before they're even mentioned. Laura is 16, not 17, through most of the book, although she was doing her AS levels and her birthday is in October. The family next door have Hindu names, but they're from Hyderabad. I was frustrated with Laura's relatively low general knowledge, though not as badly as I would have been when I was a teenager and despaired of meeting anyone who was really interested in the same stuff; I sort of expected more of the character as her mum works in publishing, as I did of George in Ali Smith's How to Be Both - but Laura's subject choices and exam results show she's not that academic, so it makes a lot more sense from her.What I found perhaps most interesting - although it could have been developed further - was the sense of young radicals both pleased and angry with a government and a prevailing political mood: the general direction is right, but lots of the details are being done wrong, as they see it: somethings going too far, others not far enough for them. It's not something I've ever experienced first hand, and it was slightly disorientating, but I figure it might have felt like this at times in countries like Greece, Spain and Iceland which have had parties further to the left than most of Europe in power, or close to it at times. Having Laura on the edges of this stuff, her friends more interested than she is, she having doubts and wavering back and forth without always feeling the need to explain herself, felt authentic for a somewhat politicised but not terribly academic teenager.I'd love to be able to sit down and talk through details of policies like this with others - but unlike those GR Marxists doing their daydreaming that's (IMO) equally unlikely to be implemented, I don't know other people sufficiently into this stuff to bounce ideas off, and this book was the closest I've got yet. Even though there were lots of points that were missing, it was very welcome. The policy was implemented very suddenly with no run-up and no time for people to retrain out of industries that were no longer viable - but then that happened during the Miners Strike in the 1980s too... What about people who commuted long distances to jobs that were still viable, and whose commutes would use most of their carbon allocation? Were companies to move? Workers? What would happen to dormitory towns? Something that surely needs to be controlled more is manufacturing of unnecessary goods - there's nothing here about second hand stuff - whereas the author concentrates a lot more on individual energy use... (Quotas for businesses are hardly even mentioned. The estate setting would have been perfect to show whether or not there are different quotas for people with disabilities who need specialist equipment like electric wheelchairs... and also rather than simply saying no nut allergies now, no asthma inhalers, no overprotective mummies; these kids are fully survival-of-the-fittest animals... well, maybe that's because some of those ones weren't physically able to survive?) The low amounts of energy that use of items like already-existing phones and computers takes up means their use wouldn't need to be as controlled as it is here - I think the author's got that mixed up with low usage of such things as an aesthetic preference of some environmentalists. (And I'm sure a lot of people would walk and cycle everywhere so they could use their computers more.) On the plus side, she clearly has picked up on the need and respect for manual trade and tech repair skills - and has responded to the rather male-dominated collapsitarian dialogue (or peak oil as it must have been when she did her research) by making perhaps the most proactive and capable character a woman (albeit one featuring traces of old-fashioned derogatory cliche about lesbians.) Making the weather into all-over-the-place "global weirding" rather than just global warming was another of the better features. Was also glad that - inevitably - an elderly person who remembered WWII rationing was a signficant character. And that normal life, or a version of it, was shown going on against these events (as old Arthur said they did then too); a few of the GR reviewers apparently find it annoying that it does - but I bet a few of them enjoy dramas set during WWII that aren't all about battles and bombs! As ever, there are correspondences with other books I've read recently: and having one character be a rather cliched gay hairdresser, who is going up in the world by starting a dating site, managed to fuse the Julian Clary novels I'd read in the last couple of months with the books on climate change... I do think there needs to be more outright camp in dystopias, to offset them - or maybe I wish I could write one - this wasn't quite it, but nice try, still.I'm not sure Carbon Diaries necessarily deserves a place on a list called "Five of the best climate-change novels" (where I heard about it) - some would argue that its appearance is a symptom of the relative shortage of quality fiction on the subject, as highlighted by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - but I was very glad of the UK setting, with plenty of everyday details, what with so much dystopian fiction being American, and of its attempts, albeit imperfect, to dramatise a policy idea. If it happens that you want to read an environmental book but everything seems too demanding a read, and you'd rather have something trashy, not sure how it would be possible to combine these inclinations, this may fit the bill.