Narrating Loss in James Bradley’s "Clade" (2015); or, Introducing Arrested Narrative in Climate Fiction

Abstract

In James Bradley’s futuristic novel of climate crises, Clade (2015), characters constructed to evoke empathy and readerly attachment, characters we expect to be further developed narratologically, are prone to sudden, unexpected and unexplained disappearances. The development of cared-for characters is thus ‘arrested’ at the level of narration. For readers, this is disarming and disconcerting. However, we find purpose in such acts of narratorial breakage in cli-fi like Clade. In contemporary stories of climate crises, which project environmental destruction, the loss of habitats and species, and severe disruption to human and nonhuman lives, the arrestation of a character’s development parallels a sense of environmental loss evoked at the level of storied content. Put another way, the sudden disappearance of character-story at the level of form imitates the sudden erasure of species, ecosystems and lived experience in the storyworld of Clade. We call such narratological innovation arrested narrative. In this essay we define and describe the appearance and function of arrested narrative in Clade, in some depth, as well as its emergence in two other novels of climate crises, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020). While investigations into narrative form in stories of the Anthropocene are not new, ecocritical literary scholarship remains largely focussed on story-level content. This examination of the way arrests in narrative discourse parallel environmental ruptures at the level of content, in selected cli-fi, is aimed at contributing to the emerging field of “econarratology” (James), concerned with the study of the workings of both form and content in ecocritical narratives.