Recent Reading: Private Rites by Julia Armfield
As climate fiction becomes a more dominant flavor in the literary field, a common set of tropes and preoccupations seems to have emerged. Often, these books are about middle class people experiencing sudden, vertiginous downward mobility, losing the financial (and eventually, physical) security they had taken for granted, discovering the indifference and cruelty that the poor and working classes are routinely subjected to. At first glance, Julia Armfield's second novel Private Rites seems to have this topic as its focus. Our first introduction to the Carmichael sisters stresses their professions and living situations, in a brief but impactful illustration of how quickly life and career expectations for people of their class have shifted, in a near-future UK in which rising sea levels and changing weather patterns have produced near-constant flooding. Isla, the eldest, can still work in her chosen profession of therapist, but has little to offer in the face of her patients' ove...