Review of THE HIGH HOUSE
To the Lighthouse meets climate change in a masterpiece of imagination.
Five years ago, the influential Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, wrote a series of essays titled The Great Derangement about his deep foray into climate change and how humanity is ignoring the growing inevitability of an uninhabitable planet. Part of his thesis is that, at the time of his writing these essays, fiction had yet to turn its eyes onto the subject. His point being that the lack of imaginative efforts to describe this existential threat only underscores the state of denial we live in. Only when we write (or film) a subject does it become a part of our conscious lives and our daily conversation. This brilliant observation no longer stands. The books are coming out.
The High House is a short, elegant, deeply moving imagining of our world gradually coming to an end. It takes place in the English countryside, near the shore during a time just far enough away from today to render it both palatable and dreamlike. The story is told in short chapters, each from a handful of narrators who are bound together by blood and circumstance. Most of the voices are young. There is a lot of weather, beautifully rendered. If Virginia Woolf was to suddenly appear and write a novel about climate change this would be it.
It might keep you up at night for a while. There is clearly no going back, and terrible things have happened and continue to happen but all at a realistic distance like thunder over the horizon. The unfolding of many truths happens gradually in the young minds of the characters just as it will in your own mind as you read it. Greengrass can really write, and she employs a poetic restraint that only reinforces the power of this small masterpiece. If you are ready for a novel on the subject that Amitav Ghosh believes may be the only subject of our time, this is a good place to start.
The High House
By Jessie Greengrass (2021)
247 pages