I've read about 700 pages of The Power Broker and I felt like I needed a fiction break, so I've been tearing through a bunch of books in the past week or so, mostly recent science fiction.
Googins's book deals with the political fallout after things have been very much set on the right path. It's an interesting moment, since it seems like the tide has been turned against the effects of climate change (called the Crisis) through the concerted efforts of people, which are described in effective detail. The battle is won! There's even an annual celebration called Day Zero.
But what happens after that? The story is wrapped within a political thriller, but it's really about the perspectives of different people: parents and kids, or two people in a relationship who had different life experiences during the same time period.
We know by the end of the book that Emi, the 15-year-old narrator of many of the chapters, has already interviewed her mother about her horrific experiences growing up, when the book began. But on the first reading, all I knew as a reader on page 22 was that the people of Earth had reached Net Zero more than 15 years earlier and some people felt like it wasn't enough in the face of the Crisis. And that included Emi's mother, Kristina.
Emi says:
I stare at the ceiling in the darkness and promise myself — if I'm a mom one day — never to make my kid feel guilty for things she can't control. Like being born after the Crisis. Like going to high school instead of saving the world. Like having a room of her own and food whenever she wants it. I promise my future self to remember that if you tell your kid how lucky she is, it never makes her feel lucky. It makes her feel terrible. Like it's her fault for being lucky, and her fault for needing to be told all the time how lucky she is, and how everyone has sacrificed everything so she can continue being so lucky without knowing how lucky she is.
Emi's interviews with her mother — done as part of a class project —are parceled out between the books' chapters. Kristina is not a point of view character, but her voice is in the interviews, describing how her life came to radicalize her. And that was the only thing that could have happened, given how terrible her circumstances were. In describing how her sister died while they were essentially convict-labor forest firefighters, she says,
Look — you see this, Emiliana, how my hands are shaking? It's not because of Yesi. I've done my grieving. It's the people who killed her and destroyed our planet and got away with it. The Leadership Council trots out veterans who grew up in the refugee camps and claim no bitterness. We hear about people from deconstructed towns who lost everything to the Crisis and say it was just one big adventure. As if forgiveness is some godly virtue. Forgiveness is not a virtue. It's cowardice. A way to avoid the unpleasantness of justice. People should be outaged. (page 171, emphasis in the original)
Emi's father, who has his own share of trauma, almost gives up early in the worst years of the Crisis but takes on the slow process of just helping however he can.
In the years after Emi is born, he and Kristina begin to drift apart in their perspective on the status of the post-Day Zero Crisis without talking about it. Is the revolution over, or does it continue?
The Great Transition doesn't answer that question, but it puts a spotlight on one family's relationships within the struggle in a way that reminded me of an episode of This American Life called The End of the World As We Know It: what happens when one family goes all in on fighting climate change, which I've been meaning to write about here since it aired in fall 2021.
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