In Christine Lai’s debut novel Landscapes, her narrator — a middle-aged archivist named Penelope who is tasked with cataloging the library and art collection of a crumbling English manor before it’s demolished — poses a question on the minds of many of us as we deal with the escalating effects of climate change: What is the role of art in a time of global loss?
The novel takes place in a near future already ravaged by climate-induced flooding and drought. The country estate of its main setting — once a verdant retreat — has been denuded and blighted by heat and lack of rain. Penelope spends her days recording the specimens of a once-proud collection before they are sold off, noting the damage from mildew and pests that have compromised them. Presented in an epistolary format as a series of journal entries, Landscapes navigates Penelope’s own uncertainty as she tries to imagine her future and make sense of her past. She lives with her partner, Aidan, and a rotating cast of climate refugees sojourning at Mornington Hall before its demise.
While the book is centered on its first-person narrator, both Aidan and his brother, Julian, play significant roles throughout. Aidan is safe and stable, offering Penelope a sense of home that will become increasingly important as their shared residence of the past two decades nears destruction. Julian looms as a shadow for much of the book; he left Mornington long ago, and is the cause of a trauma in Penelope’s past we tease out over time.
Presenting Mornington’s art collection through the eyes of an archivist, much of Landscapes is either directly or indirectly ekphrastic, offering Penelope’s meditations on various paintings and sculptures. She is a bit obsessed with J.M.W. Turner, the great English Romantic painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is appropriate that while Turner’s subjects varied widely, many of his best known works captured and preserved moments of disaster — shipwrecks, fires — and weather phenomena — storms, sunrises and sunsets, rain. In both cases, the subjects were inherently transient and mutable, the view shifting on either side of the sliver of time his brush froze in place. He’s the perfect painter to be studied in a narrative poised on the precipice of great change to its characters’ immediate and global surroundings, and hinging around a single moment of violence in its main character’s past.
Lai’s structure and tone deftly but subtly mirror Penelope’s evolving mental and emotional space across the course of the novel. Early on, her narration is patient, meticulous, displaying a cataloger’s discipline and observational detachment. As the book progresses and she faces her coming grief and displacement and anticipates the possibility of retraumatization from Julian’s planned visit, she becomes more honest with herself about her own wounds, and her closed grip on how she presents information to us loosens, becomes more fragmented and immediate. She can no more contain her own trauma and grief by maintaining a clinical remove than she can preserve the rotting artwork and books of the estate by recording them for posterity.
Which returns us to a central question of Landscapes: why bother? What’s the point in recording any of it if the record will be a mere academic footnote with no three-dimensional substance? Penelope offers one possible reason early on after lamenting the loss of the estate’s trees and the dwindling health of those that remain:
“These observations I record cannot possibly approach what Turner would have made of the current devastation, the pathos he would have given to the flinty and dry downs, the barren slopes. The emptiness. Even jotting down these words pains me tremendously. But I must continue to write, to go out there and look, again and again, as a way of paying tribute to all the life that has been lost.
If we let it all be lost through apathy and inaction, we don’t also get to let it be forgotten by the same means. We must witness.”
Parallel to Penelope’s grief over her natural surroundings and the contents of the library is her mounting dread about Julian’s planned visit before Mornington is leveled. We begin learning more about the relationship they shared decades earlier. Penelope’s own reflections on this relationship are handled deftly, with as much revealed by the shape of her omissions as by explicit revelation. We come to understand the damage one moment wrought, and how that sudden trauma both contrasts and blurs with her slow and inevitable solastalgic trauma.
Less successful are a handful of interlude chapters from Julian’s perspective. These segments are the only break from Penelope’s narration, and ultimately feel unnecessary to the book’s tone and themes. Julian is, we come to realize, a conscienceless and rudderless cad displaying likely sociopathy, and the subtlety Lai wields with Penelope’s voice is lost in his. We don’t need the plain evidence that he is missing an essential piece of his humanity and doesn’t recognize that of those around him, and the novel would be better served if its pen stayed in Penelope’s hand throughout. One could argue the intrusion of his point-of-view into the narrative mirrors the ongoing invasion of her mental and emotional health his actions have created, but these themes are still handled best in her own words.
While Julian is better as a device than a character, his impact upon Penelope is not wasted at all. As she respectfully mourns the slow loss of living things, her composure cracks as the sudden violence of her past with Julian breaks through, allowing her emotional response to both issues to run its course. Lai’s intuitive understanding of how trauma affects this character is beautifully and adroitly displayed.
Around three-quarters of the way through the book, Penelope’s narration drops its archival pretense almost altogether as she faces the impact of what happened to her decades earlier, and the necessity of bringing it to light. Ironically, this happens as she sees the need to catalog her own trauma, to name it and describe it. Two sentences in subsequent journal entries lay this bare, succinctly eschewing the patience of most entries:
“January 29—Evening
I ought to be able to write about what happened.
January 30
The physical difficulty of writing and the inner need for it.”
As she comes to terms with the losses and wounds that have shaped much of her life, there are pockets of light she lets in. With mere pages left, Penelope walks through the remaining trees of the estate, where a thriving woodland once stood. Despite the loss, these trees are still here, still stubbornly enduring: “Sometimes, the angle at which one tree leans toward another, or the lines of golden light that fall between the shadows of the trees close to sunset — sometimes these convince me that beauty is still possible.”
And that’s the closest Landscapes gets to answering its own central question — why make art at the end of all things? Because maybe it isn’t. Because beauty remembered is still beauty. Because the end of much isn’t the end of all. Because the arrogance of human climate impact is matched by the arrogance of the “human moment” as we imagine it. We are a blip; we will one day be ourselves a memory. And there will still be beauty.
Alongside this is the recognition that just as we create art in response to our own trauma and pain, we must do so in response to broader losses, even those of our own creation. We are acute emotional instruments that are nonetheless useless at calculating scale — Penelope’s life has been as shaped by one private act of violence from decades ago as by the planetary violence altering her entire world, and as her own witness, she must accept and acknowledge that if she’s to experience healing. Scale is irrelevant in the face of trauma.
Landscapes ends as it must: lost in a painting. That archivist’s detachment is long gone. Penelope stares at and into Turner’s Ehrenbreitstein, or The Bright Stone of Honour and the Tomb of Marceau, from Byron’s Childe Harold, a painting with a few trees and little water, but much stone and sky, and humans in the center of it all. Penelope begins to describe the work but abandons this and instead loses herself in an imagined character in the scene, her backstory, her day on either side of this captured moment. This reverie — like life — isn’t a record, but a story, and whatever losses and tragedies befall it, this woman must live it, just as Penelope must. It’s what she’s given to live, and she must witness and record it.
[Published by Two Dollar Radio on September 12, 2023, 230 pages, $26.00 hardcover]