Post by @federicabalbi

Robin is named after his mother’s favourite bird. He has a special grasp of the world and of the endangered environment, which his father Theo doesn’t always know how to handle.

The Earth is overheating, illnesses are spreading and Presidents can manipulate elections without consequences. Environmental activism seems to be the only plausible answer for those who want to take action, but activism has very evident limits and it acquires more and more the features of martyrdom.

Richard Powers’s new novel has the slow pace of scientific observation and research. The father and the son look at the stars, then look at the Earth from a perspective up above, and so does the reader following the narrative.

A consistent portion of the novel happens on different planets: spaces and times Theo models both for his son and for his scientific research, making hypotheses on what life could look like on other celestial bodies. The Earth is but one, stunning possibility in billions of galaxies.

The narrative flows and pauses, then starts off again for another short chapter. Robin’s sensibility towards the preservation of biodiversity is deep and dramatic, and Theo is not in the position of denying scientific evidence. 

A doubt rises in me while writing these words: is the reader in a position parallel to Robin’s? The father is the depository of knowledge the same way the reader only has the narrator to rely on. We are not denied scientific evidence, either, and what sounds dystopian is actually not far from what is already happening on Earth (and to Earth), and completely within the forecasts of scientists for the next 5 to 10 years.

This is not a novel for hope. It is rather a warning for humanity, and a eulogy for the Earth. It acquires a scientific point of view that invalidates the rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, thus offering a point of view that makes it possible to anesthetise the tragedy, the latter being already unstoppable and imminent.

Published by: Hutchinson Heinemnn, 2021

Original language: English