An elderly
man with terminal cancer tells the story of his aunt, Sarat Chestnut, and her
involvement in the Second American Civil War (2074 – 2095). We see how she, a young girl with a
relatively happy childhood, is radicalized and becomes a terrorist fighting
Northerners after her family ends up in a camp for Southern refugees. Interspersed with her narrative are primary
sources (academic studies, government reports, military documents) that flesh
out the background.
By the time
the war begins, the United States has experienced an environmental
catastrophe. Because of global warming,
the oceans have risen dramatically and forced people to move inland. A man-made plague has quarantined South
Carolina. The civil war erupts because
the government has passed a Sustainable Futures Act which prohibits the
extraction and use of fossil fuels. Longstanding
political divisions worsen, and Southerners in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia
rebel against this law and secede. The
fighting, with each side making incursions, makes refugees of even more
people. On Reunification Day, a day to
mark the end of the war, a biological agent is released which results in a
plague that takes over 100 million lives.
These
events are the background because the novel focuses on Sarat: “This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.” She is an intelligent and independent child,
but family tragedies, violent reprisals, and even the boredom of the camp make
her ripe for recruitment. Provided with
training and weapons, she is changed into a terrorist: “For Sarat Chestnut, the calculus was
simple: the enemy had violated her
people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew
it. Blood can never be unspilled.” Her anger is emphasized again and again: “Rage wrapped itself around her like a
tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” By the end, though the reader will not
condone her activities, he/she will certainly understand how she became an
angry young woman full of hatred and capable of violence.
The book
asks readers to put themselves in the position of displaced persons: “the misery of war represented the world’s
only truly universal language. Its
native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they
recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so
dearly were not the same – and yet they were.
War broke them the same way, made
them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were
nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned,
was simple: If it had been you, you’d
have done no different.”
The book is
not flawless. The premise for the civil
war is weak: would a war break out because
of a dispute over the use of fossil fuels?
(Though there is a nod to a contemporary nation divided by
ideology: the word Red is shorthand for
the South, a term that has “something to do with who voted for the old
Republican Party back when it was all still one country.”) The science is questionable: would all of Florida be inundated by rising
ocean levels? Would drones go rogue
because a server farm is destroyed?
There are coincidences that do not ring true: Sarat’s repeated meetings with a friend are
very improbable. There are the things
that don’t change: one hundred years in
the future, people will still watch television?
And there are things that aren’t
mentioned: in fifty years, race issues
have been resolved?
To increase
the book’s plausibility, the author makes reference to issues which have
parallels in our world. The U.S. is
currently involved in foreign conflicts; in the novel, foreign powers become
involved in the American civil war because of their own agendas. A representative of a pan-Arab empire, which
has emerged and wants to become the new superpower, admits that Americans
cannot be allowed to kill themselves in peace: “’we intend . . . to be the most powerful empire in the
world. For that to happen, other empires
must fail. . . . Everyone fights an American war.’” Refugees are often unwelcome in parts of our
world; in the next century of the novel, refugees are often disliked. One man who was a refugee years earlier
protests the arrival of newer refugees: “Nativism
being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence
in a city already overwhelmed. At the
foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be
a pestilence field. We carried signs
calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would
take them in. It made me feel good to do
it, it made me feel rooted: their
unbelonging was proof of my belonging.”
(I love the twist to the refugee crisis:
“’If you ever stand anywhere on this shore, say in New Algiers, you’ll
see fleets of ragged little boats headed southward from the European shore . .
. Boats full of migrants from the old
Union countries, looking for better lives.’”)
Certainly, the climate change deniers of today are like the people in
the novel who refuse to give up their vehicles powered by the remains of “ancient
lizards.” There are power struggles
among various rebel groups, the types of struggles that can be found in the
Middle East today. There is even passing
reference to antibiotic drug resistance:
“’there used to be drugs that could have fixed her right up, but
everybody used them too much and they didn’t work anymore.’”
Though not
without its faults, this book is worth reading.
It is thought-provoking, providing a new perspective on refugees, and
emphasizes the need to take care of these people. If we do nothing, we had best hope that “even
someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.” The book will leave you thinking, “There but
for the grace of God, go I.”
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