Mark Hoffman Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Mark Johnson and his debut novel, "Though the Earth Gives Way."
Though the Earth Gives Way is not your children’s post-apocalyptic fiction.
This is important because if you’ve absorbed even a fraction of the dystopian popcorn novels of the last two decades, you’re going to expect a caricatured villain to appear no later than the fifth chapter, followed by some style of Katniss Everdeen quest.
That’s not happening here. You won’t even get much climate change. Threat and madness hover, but mostly as PTSD. The climate boom lowers before the book begins and we’re, just barely, in the aftermath. “It’s too late to do anything,” explains author Mark S. Johnson.
The novel, published by Bancroft Press in January, grew out of a late-career discontent with his work as a health and science reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Even though Johnson was part of a team from the paper that shared a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, he gradually felt the impact of his work diminishing. “All of these stories, while they seem important at the time, they pale in comparison to the one major story of our lifetime,” he says in an interview. “Climate change.”
Johnson’s author bio begins with the deadpan admission that “he did not attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” but he’s always been interested in fiction. This was the first idea for a novel that he liked. And so he began writing at night, squeezing an hour or two into the evenings, before his bedtime reading. It renewed his love of the craft.
In the not-too-distant future Johnson’s narrator, Elon, spends a lot of time thinking about how he became a climate refugee. “It came as a shock, though it shouldn’t have,” Elon says of the precipitous rise in sea level that sent coastal residents scurrying into the heartland. Infrastructure collapses and social order unravels. After a year or so wandering in the wilderness, a handful of exhausted souls meet by chance at a wooded retreat center in rural Michigan. The novel imagines the first steps of psychological triage.
For Elon and his companions, that can’t happen without some kind of reckoning. “Climate divided us into two camps: believers and deniers, each harboring its own anger and guilt, hatred, and self-loathing. For hours on the road, I interrogated myself. What did I do to prevent the catastrophe? Why did I fail? How did I, a believer in the science, end up complicit in the disaster?”
Though the book was finished before the emergence of COVID-19, this sometimes feels like a pandemic novel, and all the more so because Johnson explores the polarization around climate and adjacent issues. The premise is that this political divide might look very different after the fall.
If things go as badly as many people fear, Johnson believes any conversations will be difficult. “Whose side were you on? Were you one of the people who believed the scientists? Did you try to live a better life? Or were you one of the people who doubted?” he asks.
There’s going to be anger and there’s going to be guilt, because a lot of people believed the scientists’ warnings, but didn’t do a lot. “We’re basically complicit — which is where I fit in,” he admits. “And probably also a lot of Americans. We’re kind of, all of us, the bad guys. And it’s a very uncomfortable position.”
This is an uncomfortable read. But that’s kind of the point, and no big surprise coming from a man who listens to the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith and loves Dr. Strangelove.
Johnson’s inspiration for Though the Earth Gives Way came from Boccaccio’s The Decameron, in which a group of noblemen and women flee the Black Death. Holed up in a villa outside of Florence, they pass the time by telling stories.
Here, instead of nobles, these are starving nomads awkwardly gathered around the campfire and sharing the only food they have. And they begin to tell stories. “We trade in stories, don’t we?” says one. “That’s how we unlock intimacy in each other. The stories don’t have to be big or dramatic. … Stories help us forget how small we truly are. They are a way to leave a few footprints in the sand.”
Before they can contemplate rebuilding, they have to recapture their trust in each other. “I think that human trust is one of the things that we really wrestle with,” Johnson says.
And this story really begins with betrayal on a global scale. Oil industry scientists modeled climate change way back in the 1970s and warned their corporate bosses what was coming and that burning fossil fuels was the root cause. They knew, and did worse than nothing: They set about publicly undermining the science even as they continue to use that same science to line their pockets. “The fact that they were unable — and we’ve been unable — to make the right choices is devastating,” says Johnson.
He has a son who is 23, so when Johnson reads about projections for 2030 and 2040, he feels awful. “The one thing that both conservatives and liberals I think would agree on is that we all want to leave our children better off than we were. I think it’s going to be very hard to do that.”
