THE HIGH HOUSE

British author Greengrass' latest is a grim and often moving hybrid, a post-apocalyptic climate change novel with a doomed domestic idyll tucked inside.

Francesca is a renowned climate change activist, ever more in demand as her bleak, accurate predictions earn her a reputation as a Cassandra. As the global situation deteriorates, she more and more leaves her teenage stepdaughter, Caro, in charge of her young son, Pauly, and the two half siblings develop a powerful bond. (Francesca's husband, the children's father, has begun traveling with her to aid her work.) Francesca is a fascinating character—high-minded, laser-focused, sanctimonious, apparently allergic to joy; her neglect has a sadness in it, too, that of the parent who feels called to "higher" duty and who, it will turn out, has done the best she can in the ways that align with her skills and her inclinations. Just before she and her husband are killed in a storm on the East Coast of the U.S., Francesca tells Caro to decamp from London with Pauly to a remote bluffside home that she's worked, unbeknownst to the kids, to make into a refuge, a well-stocked, mostly self-sustaining hidy-hole. Francesca has hired as caretakers an irascible young woman named Sal and her grandfather. Caro and Pauly arrive just in time to learn of Francesca’s and their father's deaths, and they settle in to the high house for whatever slow and limping limbo humankind has left to it. The book's great strength is in the way it depicts this period. There's no large-scale hope or drama remaining; choices made long ago have wreaked their irreversible damage, and all that's left for the four is to sustain themselves quietly, with whatever portion of peace and pleasure they can manage, for as long as possible. Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable.

A bleak, poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.