Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood

Abstract

Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Tambora: The Eruption that Changed World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. 293. $29.95. Gillen D'Arcy Wood's new book, which maps out a chain of apparently unrelated disasters triggered by explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815, arrives as a timely intervention for a humanities obsessed with subspecialty buzzwords like empire and ecology, even as it serves as a validation of urgent pleas by forward-looking activists--some might say realists--that time is running out. It is truly not for nothing then that D'Arcy Wood describes Tambora as a cautionary tale that foretells our own fate (11). What he claims in his chapter on Tambora-induced early-American crop failure serves as a frightening leitmotif of whole book and of our precarious contemporary condition: the old weather legends revive again to haunt us, this time as premonitory images of our own emerging climate dystopia (200). We might well say that D'Arcy Wood's book puts into historicized climate-change context both Faulkner's remark that past isn't dead, it isn't even past, and Joyce's that history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken. As D'Arcy Wood shows in grim detail, Year without a Summer of 1816 that resulted from Tambora, in addition to being a time of devastating famines, epidemics, and death, was also year that Mary Shelley conceived of and began Frankenstein. Born in a chateau at feet of Swiss Alps from 18 June 1816 ghost-writing contest between rain-rebuffed Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Frankenstein remains a cautionary tale about humanity's scientific and technological ambitions doubling back and threatening their continued species' existence. As D'Arcy Wood is quick to recount, this contest among sheltered friends and literary rivals (they weren't quite, as we say now with that wonderfully Frankensteinian word-merger, frenemies) resulted in two defining monsters of modernity: creature from Frankenstein and, more waywardly, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), which emerged from dim influence of Polidori's fragmentary Vampyre, itself adapted from Byron's own fragmentary ghost tale (51-53). But D'Arcy Wood's is not simply another account of these well-known literary and cultural touchstones; instead, his is first study to link them to weather-related causal history, specifically, Tambora's eruption and its resulting strange and stormy stratospheric disruptions. In lucid and compelling prose, D'Arcy Wood illuminates how Romanticism's most globally visible creation on page, stage, screen, and Halloween trappings--Shelley's creature--is intimately tied (and one can think here of icy, treacherous accumulations of Blanc that appear in so many late Romantic texts) to what we now call, variously, global warming, climate change, or, in more no-nonsense phrase, global climate disaster. As tantalizing as this may sound for Romanticists and literary historians, it is not D'Arcy Wood's intention to explore implications of Tambora for, and in work of, Shelleys and Byron despite occasionally brief-and for this reader, often glancing and cursory--readings that pop up (Darkness, 66-69; The Last Man, 95-96; Mont Blanc, Frankenstein, 151-57). Rather, Shelleys and Byron serve as our occasional tour guides through suffering worldscape of 1815-1818 (9). Although book's fleeting glimpses of such important figures, and his breezy reading of their works, will prove frustrating for some, D'Arcy Wood nevertheless does open pathways for future Romantic-era studies by providing a transatlantic and transpacific scientific and historical context for Shelley circle in particular and late Romanticism in general. So while D'Arcy Wood demonstrates Tambora's importance for some key Romantic texts--like aforementioned Frankenstein--his main aim is both more globally-ranging and broadly popular (as low price tag suggests, D'Arcy Wood and Princeton University Press are targeting a much more inclusive market than typical academic one). …