“Our grandchildren will look at Chevron and Exxon ads the way you and I look at swastikas”. Stephen Markley’s The Deluge between novel and prophecy
Abstract
Alternating between narrative and essayistic reflection, the article examines the interpenetration of secularised prophecy and realist fiction in Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2022). When compared with other ways of narrating the climate crisis, Markley’s novel seems to stand out for its search for a virtuous compromise between the desire to speak to many people and the need to defend the complexity of literature; a balance evident in the paradox of a novel that, on the one hand, allows itself to be reduced to a few edifying slogans, but on the other hand tells tragic stories where no one is right and everyone fails. At the same time, The Deluge is a highly experimental work that would be impossible to take as a model: what, then, is its relevance today?
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