The God of the Whirlwind - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 171

gone astray and whose excessive love or anger wreaks havoc on their own
lives. 147 Placed partly in the past, in the era of 1980's eco-terrorism, and
partly in the future, when severe climate change has set in for good, the
topic acknowledges the atempt to bring about political transformation
more openly than Becket does but renders it comically, as if even activ-
ism is ludicrous. We could object that treating activism in this way comes
close to authorizing passivity and indifference, but instead, as the novel
looks back on those efforts from a defeated future, it makes comedy the
antidote to a potentially overriding sense of political despair, treating
even failure as part of a ridiculous and ultimately comic condition. The
novel does not shrink from depicting that uter defeat, imagining a world
when most large nonhuman animals are extinct or greatly endangered,
fiercely intense storms are commonplace, and the forests of the American
West have fallen to the earth. Yet because the topic is set in a world with-
out ecological hope, it sharpens the perspective of comedy, daring us to
laugh precisely at what is irredeemable, to affirm our truly grotesque folly.
The novel focuses on the misadventures of a familiar comic type—an
aging, easily enraged, sexually manipulable, often drunk white man who
is well-meaning and truly loving but whose decisions almost always go
wrong. By centering on this character, Boyle invites us to view the world
of the novel through a position of radical error and ineptitude, using the
ancient comic strategy of regarding the world from below, from that irre-
pressibly impulsive, desiring, persistent dimension of us that, no mater
how much it might whine and complain, still endures. Here, as so often,
comedy might evade a full confrontation with disaster, indulging in a lit-
erary stylization of loss, but in doing so it makes loss livable. It demon-
strates how human beings might adapt to an impossible world through an
entertaining performance that conquers defeat itself through the minor
powers of self-mockery and absurdist play. If activism cannot ward of the
ruins, laughter can convert them into the material of an art.
But even comedy has its limits. Boyle is less honest than Becket,
for he does not directly stage the possibility that the shtick will get old,
that the laughter may ring a bit hollow, that the absurd life it celebrates
may not go on. If we are to live in the ruins, we need something more,
something beyond all the genres I have mentioned so far—a kind of
wild mythology, and perhaps even a mad theology, for the ruins. Tragedy