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' overpowering climate anxiety. Only a year younger, Irene once pursued a PhD in the history of early Christianity, but now works as an office manager. Their much-younger half-sister, Agnes, is a barista, bouncing between flatshares in crumbling high rise buildings where the elevators don't work and black mold creeps down the walls, making no plans for the future because, as she and her friends frequently muse, there probably isn't going to be one.

The sisters' father, Stephen Carmichael, was a renowned architect known for designing sustainable buildings for life in the climate changed world. The Carmichael family home rests on pylons which rise and fall with the surrounding water, creating an illusion of stability in a shifting world. But as the sisters repeatedly muse, Stephen's designs mostly proved impractical and unscalable. The Carmichael home's supports are too spindly to withstand more than the weight of a single family; the house will literally buckle if too many people enter it. (Also, in what feels like a classic "visionary architect" blunder, the surfaces in the house are all exposed, smooth concrete, producing an acoustic nightmare; growing up, the Carmichael daughters were obliged to wear socks at all times so as not to disturb their father, resulting in multiple slips and falls.) Stephen's other projects, too, were ultimately just ways for the rich to distance themselves from what is happening to everyone else—a restaurant high in the sky, designed as a warm, inviting space, in which to forget the inhospitable outside world.

That Stephen's daughters are excluded from this bubble of wealth and stability is partly just an expression of how older generations in the novel's world have pulled up the ladder behind them. But it is also a function of the Carmichael family's deep dysfunction. Stephen, we learn, was the prototypical "difficult" genius, demanding absolute acquiescence to his needs, and giving no thought to the needs of others. His parenting style was alternately neglectful—Isla did much of the raising of her younger sisters—and abusive, withholding affection and praise, mocking the girls to their faces with cruel but accurate dissections of their faults, and pitting them against each other.

Private Rites opens with the news of Stephen's death, forcing his daughters, who have cut him out of their lives and have at-best strained relations with each other, back into roles they have worked hard to leave behind. This is, of course, a classic premise of literary, character-based fiction, from Hannah and Her Sisters to A Thousand Acres to the recent movie His Three Daughters. Something about this setup—a dying father, the relationships of daughters to their fathers, the stifling roles of elder, middle, and younger sister—seems to appeal to writers. (Private Rites namechecks King Lear in its epigraph, but this seems like a thin reference at best.) Late in the novel, Agnes even recognizes the genre she appears to be living in, reflecting that "If this were a film ... this conversation would end with them hugging and dancing around to a song that they all remember. The camera would pan out like someone watching from beyond the windows to see the three of them twirling around the sofa in the warm electric light."

In reality, things are a lot more fraught between the Carmichael sisters. Isla and Irene barely get along, and both continue to resent Agnes for the way their mother was shuffled out of Stephen and their lives and quickly replaced with hers. Agnes, in return, has mostly cut her sisters out of her life, rarely returning their calls or texts. As the sisters are thrown together by the mundane demands that crop up in the aftermath of a death—identifying the body, arranging a funeral, dealing with lawyers and caretakers—they repeatedly clash against each other in increasingly dysfunctional ways. Isla, a perfectionist who tries "so hard to be well behaved and normal that it goes round the other side and comes out completely unhinged", can't seem to open her mouth without passing judgment. Confrontational Irene picks a fight at every opportunity. Agnes shuts down her phone for days at a time, then gets angry when decisions are made without her. Eventually it becomes impossible for the sisters to exchange more than a few words without one of them putting the worst possible interpretation on something the other has said. Scenes in which the three sisters share space eventually take on a sort of hyper-realist, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf cast, with the reader, like the hapless dinner guests in that play, forced to witness the characters' almost gleeful descent into vicious, nonstop sniping.

All of this, of course, sits very oddly in what we had thought was a work of climate fiction. All around the three sisters, collapse continues apace. Irene's spouse Jude, who works at a housing office trying to help people whose homes have become uninhabitable or simply slipped away, comes home every day with increasingly terrible, hopeless stories. As weather conditions deteriorate, Isla becomes unable to meet her patients in her office, and their hesitance to continue therapy online feels like an admission that there is nothing she can offer them in this rapidly-deteriorating world. It's not that the sisters are unaware that all this is happening—Isla spends a restless night observing her neighbor's house as it subsides and then slides out of view. But, perhaps recognizing their helplessness in the face of this calamity, they instead pour most of their energy into each other. Into fruitlessly relitigating their childhoods, accusing each other of having had things easy, having betrayed their principles, having failed to stand up to their father.

In this, the Carmichaels are perhaps no different than everyone around them. Private Rites is often a litany of the unhealthy coping mechanisms people have developed in the face of seemingly inescapable catastrophe. Irene spends hours on a website in which people roleplay lost normalcy. "I'd pick you up in my car because I have a car, one post overexplains, and after I've picked you up in my car I'll drive us both through the city because I have a car and we both love to drive." Isla observes that her patients report more ritualized behavior, sometimes their own, sometimes directed at them. Her ex-wife Morven leaves her to go into the mountains and join an intentional community, hoping to discover a new, viable way of life (the god's eye perspective that sometimes crops up, in interludes titled "City", is politely skeptical about the feasibility of such projects).

As Private Rites juggles its two seemingly disparate genres, the family drama and the tale of climate collapse, hints of yet another story begin to appear. Isla and Irene remember (and then immediately suppress) strange occurrences from their childhood, odd visitors to the house and inexplicable behavior from their mother. Agnes keeps noticing strange people staring at her in the street. Background figures—Stephen's former housekeeper, Agnes's new roommate—behave strangely. By the time the novel makes a final genre shift into horror, readers will be ready for it, even if the characters aren't. 

Rather than carry the novel further away from realism, however, this shift cements it in that mode. For all the growing popularity of climate fiction, there is rarely any acknowledgment that it is a genre rooted in horror's building blocks. In dread and anxiety in the face of a changing world. And if the Carmichael sisters choose to process those feelings by delving into their mundane family squabbles, others around them choose to change the genre of their own lives. "I think they got it into their heads that something was wrong that could only be solved this way," one of Isla's patients says when describing his parents performing an exorcism on him. "They wanted to feel like they were taking action, given how little they could do anywhere else." 

What Private Rites seems to be saying is that these two reactions—the deranged flight into magical thinking and ritualized behavior, and the polite slide into nihilism, into jokes about "why bother? we'll all be dead by then"—are two sides of the same coin. It's not that the novel thinks there is something its characters could be doing, something more concrete than exorcisms and rituals. But it hates the resignation they sink into—the same resignation, we eventually come to realize, which is at the root of the sisters' inability to relate to each other, to finally sit down and talk through their resentments and traumas. And, just as Private Rites is not a the sort of story in which estranged sisters bury the hatchet by singing and dancing together, neither is it one in which the damage we've done to our planet and our society can be fully healed. Like humanity, the sisters have let things slide, let the damage accumulate, until it is almost too late. But at the last minute, they refuse to give in, and manage to buy themselves a reprieve—a temporary one, to be sure, but then what other kind is there? "We're not going to fucking drown," one of the sisters says in the novel's final pages. "We're going to swim."