As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Roz Dineen on the research process behind her novel Briefly Very Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Briefly Very Beautiful imagines a future that feels, at times, at such proximity with our present world that we might tip into it at any moment. Before delving more deeply into how and why that story is told, I’m curious about the more formal aspects of research that might have informed your composition. You cite, for example, the IPCC’s 2023 report on climate change as a source, and I’m interested to know how you handled the materials of climate science in creating the imagined near-future of the novel.
The research was a process of submersion and then a putting away. For a couple of years, before I began to write the book, I read quite obsessively around climate change and its societal effects. And then I put all that information down and almost forgot about it. It’s hard to get into the flow of writing fiction if you are constantly stopping to refer to facts and statistics, so I did the mental equivalent of leaving the data, the evidence, at the bottom of a drawer. (Hilary Mantel said she did something similar when writing historical fiction.) The climate emergency was the setting for the novel, but I wanted the characters to be the drive, the main event. If I delineated the climate science too precisely, the world of the novel wouldn’t feel real; the characters must be allowed to take their reality for granted, they rarely have the chance to stop and comment upon it. The climate breakdown is the air they breathe; they know it, and suffer it, but do not stop to analyse it. There is some description of the societal breakdown in the book, but I think most of the work of conveying this is done by describing the effect it has on the characters’ bodies, their senses, their hypervigilance and speech patterns.
By denying myself access to the science during the writing process, and relying on my memory, I found that two things happened: firstly, the bits I could recall naturally from the research were the most salient, evocative facts (eg. A&E waiting rooms see more patients suffering from schizophrenic episodes during a heatwave; after a wildfire, tree roots continue to burn underground like ovens and the air smells of plastic); and, secondly, all the information I had read had formed itself into a pretty cohesive web of understanding in my mind, which I could rely on. There is a quote from that IPCC report you mention that stayed with me throughout, ‘There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).’ I had that one learned by heart. That one’s pretty memorable even after you’ve put all the research in a drawer.
Connected to that, I’d love to drill deeper into how the broader concerns of the climate emergency – particularly predictions around its effect on human behaviour – helped to build the narrative of Briefly Very Beautiful. To what extent did predictions around the development of, for example, border securitisation or societal collapse inform the characters you created and the challenges they would face throughout the novel. Does the novel itself constitute ‘a prediction’ or ‘speculation’?
Rather than a prediction or speculation I thought of the novel as a realistic exaggeration (if that’s not too nuanced a distinction to make) – taking things as they were in the current moment and turning the heat up by a degree or two. There is nothing in the world of the novel that has not happened somewhere in the real world, internet outages, terrorist groups, wildfires, shortages, draconian border controls, I just put all these circumstances in one place and increased the heat a tiny bit. This did not inform the creation of the characters too much, they are who they would have been if this story had been told without the climate apocalypse at its heels. I wanted to create people who you could imagine walking among us now, in terms of attitude, and feel how they have adjusted to their changing circumstances. They sort of straddle the now and the near-future setting of the book. In a lot of cli-fi, the characters are a few decades, or even a generation or two, into the devastated world. In The Parable of the Sower, for example, the cast of characters have lived a long time in their destroyed society, and therefore there is a new kind of person in the world of that book. But I wanted to imagine people who knew the world as we know it, now, and had not had a great deal of time to adapt. The climate / societal breakdown in the book has happened very recently, and it was quick. When I was writing, I was taking all the news stories I’d read and running them gently to their logical conclusions. It’s amazing how quickly and plausibly everything falls apart when you do this.
I suppose this realistic exaggeration gave me an opportunity to see what Cass (the protagonist) is made of. And I think I was trying to divine what sort of characters a ‘New World’ would require. It was interesting and surprising to me find that the ones who survive are pretty ‘low-key’ (as my kids would put it). The ones who survive are quite quiet, they are not in the business of advertising anything about themselves to anyone. They are collectively-minded rather than staunchly ambitious; any self-realisation or actualisation they acquire goes in service of the group.
I was particularly drawn to the way the novel connects the climate crisis with themes of motherhood, particularly with the tension between parental instinct and society. Specifically, I think Briefly Very Beautiful posits a direct challenge to the idea that we, as social animals, have the ability to retain trust in each other while being forced to protect ourselves and our families from catastrophe. I’m curious to know how your perspectives on motherhood may have fed into the novel, and whether that tension between instinct and society is something that resonates with you.
While I have never stated this belief so directly, it is in the novel, and in me, so I might as well come clean: I do sort of believe that when you centre the mother in society, and by that I mean, when you remove any tension the mother may feel between her instinct and her society, you might achieve something that could save and benefit us all. Today, mothers, particularly young mothers of young children are pulled in two directions between instinct (I will protect these cubs at all cost, they are the centre of my focus, nothing else matters) and society (I will please and be pleasing and raise these children in a way that society – a society that often shows evidence of profound sickness – approves of, in order to guarantee my safety). I think if society puts the needs of mothers and young children first, and society aids rather than abets the mother’s instinct to protect the cubs first, then a lot falls into place. You want to create a society that puts nurture before exploitation. I think what I was getting at in the book is that society’s attitude towards mothers, and beyond that, our attitudes towards each other in our intimate relationships, has been, can be, deeply exploitative. And there is a parallel between how we can treat each other – as resources – and how we have treated the earth – as a resource. We often try to maximise the productivity and efficiency of our resources, rather than collectively nourish and keep them. We can and should be able to trust our society to protect and nurture our better instincts.
Another highly-charged theme throughout the novel is that of masculinity and its relation to power. It seems to me that the two male-led communities in the novel – Gaia’s incel terrorists and the entropic utopia of Eigleath – both incorporate forms of what we might understand as toxic masculinity, supported by and facilitated by the structure of a cult. I wonder if that framing of cults as providing an opening to toxic masculinity is a purposeful one, and how far the individual behaviours of men like Arthur and Nathaniel can be attributed to the opportunities provided by community-without-accountability.
This is a very interesting question to me because I never actually considered ‘toxic masculinity’ as I wrote. Behind the two main male characters, Arthur and Nathaniel, lies a pretty toxic mother (one who most definitely overrode her better instincts). These two men are only doing what it takes to survive her. They are only doing the best thing they can think of to make themselves feel safe (and are unable to see that their version of ‘safety’ is often contingent on another’s suffering). They don’t have the resources to do anything else. I think the most devastating thing for both of them is that they were afforded so much power (one as a respected, educated, privileged-white, rich doctor; the other as a good-looking, court of chaos landlord and drug-dealer) before anyone could attend to the fact that they are deeply injured people. They should have received more care before they were offered the keys to the world. Maybe this is what ‘toxic masculinity’ means. I think I’m trying to say that the most ‘toxic’ man in the book (arguably, Nathaniel) is not affiliated to a cult and would probably disdain such things. He also has very little community. But he does sort of seem to think that he should act without accountability. So rather than the framing of a cult offering Nathaniel community-without-accountability, I think he has been offered life-without-accountability and maybe this is due to a bigger, capitalistic cult of which we are nearly all members.
I suppose the eco-terrorist group in the book, Gaia, is a cult, but I thought of it more as a grass-roots movement. Rather than toxic masculinity, I actually saw in Gaia something quite sweet and loving. Gaia forms because some Incels (the Involuntarily Celibate) realise that Mother Earth can be their perfect women. They no longer have to be locked out of partnership. It’s lovely; they can adore Mother Earth, they commune in her nature and feel her, their lover, giving back to them through the trees and the hills and the few remaining natural landscapes. But then they realise they must protect their lover at all costs, particularly against the procreators and children, whom they identify as a plague. And because so many of these Incels have felt on the outside of society, they find it easy to dehumanise young families. So they become an anti-humanist movement, but the steps they took to get there were a plaintive love of Mother Earth, not a suppressing of emotion (as in toxic masculinity), and their violence is one of fierce protectional devotion, not a desire to dominate (as in toxic masculinity).
I think Gaia came about because I wanted to explore the idea that we don’t really want a situation where people can say, the only nurture I have ever felt is in nature. We don’t want to detach the beauty of the earth from the beauty of the beings that inhabit it. We need connections. But to have true connections with people (and with Earth), you have to put down any notions of the power that you wield.
To loop back to the question, I think the book traces a couple of toxic relationships, and perhaps also suggests that cultish thinking can give people an easy out from having to deal with nuance and complexity. This wasn’t necessarily an intention. As with most of the book, it’s just what happened when I put a young mother, alone, with three children, in a world that is as psychologically dangerous to her as it is physically dangerous.
To close, I’d like to circle back to climate change. While reading Briefly Very Beautiful, I was reminded of Amitav Ghosh’s idea that ‘the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human experience is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis.’ I wanted to ask whether you feel fiction has a role in both imagining and combating the climate crisis. Is fiction a useful forum for not just imagining possible futures but in eliciting present behaviours, for changing the course? Is the novel well-placed to have that kind of impact?
Writing the novel allowed me to explore firstly, what type of person a climate apocalypse might create, what effect it might have on us, and then, what type of person a post-apocalyptic world, a New World, if you like, might demand and require. So, yes, I think fiction is a rich place to explore what might become of us and how we might cope and who we might have to become. I can’t think of another medium that would have allowed me to explore this so deeply.
Fiction can of course play a role in combatting the climate crisis, perhaps by drawing our attention to what we are anaesthetized to. But I reckon few readers come to fiction to be lectured at. The best fiction, in my opinion, is about the complexity of character, and the inescapable inevitabilities of character, and the utter inconvenience of these for all involved. And it’s about the details that someone other than you might notice. Some of the best fiction often has very small ambitions. ‘Changing course,’ is a big ambition.
I was reading today about Donna Haraway’s theory that stories, especially heroic stories, will not necessarily help us. Not everything, she says, is a problem that can be solved by the Hero’s Journey. There is no key to averting climate change, no riddle or grail. It’ll be something we adapt to and adapt with, like grief. I think she would argue that we need stories, not of how the knight slayed the dragon, but of how he learnt to live with it. I think the novel is well-placed to, as Ghosh puts it, ‘imagine other forms of human experience,’ but I’m not sure it will kill any monsters.
Roz Dineen is the author of Briefly Very Beautiful which was shortlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize. Formerly, she was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for twelve years and the Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, ArtReview, and LitHub, among others. Her second novel is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.