“The Dying Party” asks: ‘What happens when they tell us it's too late to stop climate change?’
The novel answers this with two parallel story lines. One centers on two main characters. Late in the 2040s, Lizzie and Donnie are two of only six people left alive in a residential complex that had been built into the side of Newfoundland’s Gros Morne mountain, now the only piece of habitable land left above water in all of what was once eastern Canada. In the second story line we follow a group of humanity's richest and most powerful, trying to establish an off-Earth colony for themselves.
“The Dying Party” explores in fascinating detail what having to accept such a fate would mean; what it would look like on a global scale, a local context, and from a variety of personal perspectives. The author’s research shows that if we stay on our present course, such a declaration will come sooner than we think. This is not fanciful speculation about the future, but rather the logical extension of the current course of humanity. This is an unflinchingly depiction of the worst-case scenario, and is therefore a cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales.
“The Dying Party” asks: ‘What happens when they tell us it's too late to stop climate change?’
The novel answers this with two parallel story lines. One centers on two main characters. Late in the 2040s, Lizzie and Donnie are two of only six people left alive in a residential complex that had been built into the side of Newfoundland’s Gros Morne mountain, now the only piece of habitable land left above water in all of what was once eastern Canada. In the second story line we follow a group of humanity's richest and most powerful, trying to establish an off-Earth colony for themselves.
“The Dying Party” explores in fascinating detail what having to accept such a fate would mean; what it would look like on a global scale, a local context, and from a variety of personal perspectives. The author’s research shows that if we stay on our present course, such a declaration will come sooner than we think. This is not fanciful speculation about the future, but rather the logical extension of the current course of humanity. This is an unflinchingly depiction of the worst-case scenario, and is therefore a cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales.
Part One: The Spiral Down
And you tell me over and over and over again, my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
Barry McGuire
“Eve of Destruction”
Chapter 1: RSVP
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…
Without looking up, as sweet as he can: “Doin’ a couple of lines with me or what, babe?”
Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…that plastic card…Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…
Standing at the window with her back to him, bloodshot eyes fixed, she gazes through filthy layers of thick glass without seeing and whispers: “No.”
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…the metal table…Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…
His tone now mocking: “Aw, come on now… I think it’ll help ya.”
Chop.Chop.Chop…incessant!…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…
Suddenly turning around, glaring, she shouts: “No!”
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…
His wheedling continues as though she had said nothing at all: “It’s good stuff, ya know...”
She throws up her hands with her eyes. God damn!
“Do you know what I had to go through to get all this together?”
Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop.
“Jesus, Donnie!”
He looks up, a veneer of optimism: “Well, how about a shot, then, hey? C’mon now.”
She falls back on the ratty sofa chair, throwing her head back with a barely audible: “No.”
With an exaggerated shrug and twisted mouth, he looks back down at his table, eyes widening. “So much for the party part,” he says to himself aloud.
Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop...Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…
Lizzie is stewing in a stupor of fear and sadness, picking at a scab on her arm, staring into space. “Well, you won’t have to bother with any of this shit after tonight, will you? Or with me...”
Chop.Chop.Chop!... His eyes close, defeated. “Fuck, Lizzie.”
“What?” she responds and immediately regrets perpetuating the conversation.
“You know very well what. You’d think all this was only happening to you personally. Look around, Lizzie. Haven’t you heard? There’s no such thing as a private hell anymore!”
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…
For fuck’s sake! She droops forward dejected, eyelids sagging, hands piled on top of her head: “Anyway… It’s not your dying party, is it? It’s mine.”
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop.CHOP! Still looking down, his mocking tone returns: “And you’re gonna cry if you want to, hey Liz?” The card starts to gather, lining it up.
“You can be a real prick sometimes, ya know that?”
“Yeah, I know.”
Stone-faced, eyes dead. “Yeah, you know.” Shit.
Two feet of yellow rubber tubing hovers in one hand, the other held out in half-hearted appeal. “Sorry, babe.” He inserts it expertly. “You’ll feel better when they get here.” I know I will.
Quick exhale–long sniff…quick exhale–long sniff…exhale…and that last finishing drag she has come to dread: the coarse shudder of pulverized material engaging a badly eroded septum. It fills the room and shakes her to the core, triggering a sudden wave of nausea as it always has. These days he is crushing and snorting anything he can reduce to powder. She hates it, and she hates the sound of his worsening nasal passages. But that doesn’t mean she cares much about what it’s doing to him. She doesn’t. Not anymore.
It is early 2049.
* * *
Elizabeth Antoinette Flint was born the only child of two stereotypical hippie-types from Washington State. Among thousands of people on the flights forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11, bright-eyed newlyweds Chet and Amelia Flint were heading to Europe for their honeymoon. Instead, they ended up making the best of it where fate had put them – on a rugged pristine island in the North Atlantic they affectionately call “The Rock”.
As the world was dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attack in New York City, Chet and Millie were catching the spirit of the famously friendly island and soon set aside their disappointment about the European trip. Heartily cheered on by the boisterous, backslapping natives, prodigious drinkers all, they made matrimonial merriment with the locals for ten days and nights. When it was time to depart, their bittersweet sadness surprised them both – a special seed had been planted in their bohemian hearts.
Back on the Pacific coast, they tried unsuccessfully for eighteen years to have a child. Then, inspired by a popular Broadway musical about the homespun brand of hospitality Gander residents showed the stranded travellers that day in 2001, Chet and Millie returned to Newfoundland for a holiday in the summer of 2019 and never went back. Their search for a place where they could live off the grid turned up many nice spots around the province, and they finally settled on a cozy saltbox-style house in the little seaside village of Daniel’s Harbour on the island’s west coast.
A few months later, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking hold around the globe, came an unexpected bonus. The change of scenery had done the trick and Millie was pregnant. As middle-aged flowerchildren who had all but given up on having kids of their own, they were elated. They insisted on an all-natural home birth with a local midwife, a harpsichord, two doves, and plenty of granola. And late in 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, little Lizzie came to be. With the blessed arrival of their long-awaited baby daughter in an idyllic pastoral setting they had both been dreaming about since the sixties, they were all set to start living happily ever after.
That was almost seven years before The Announcement.
* * *
Lizzie shifts around in her chair, belaboring yet another sigh, desultorily laying aside the novel she had been trying to read. Even as reading books gradually fell out of favour with most people in the 2020s, like so many other activities that bowed out in the face of humanity’s ever-shortening attention span, Lizzie’s love affair with stories and the written word since childhood continued. Just a year or so ago she was still collecting books wherever she could find them. But these days even her precious books are failing her.
Donnie sniffs and snarks his way across a room littered with shadows and random pieces of trash, sidestepping books and stacks of books that Lizzie has scattered throughout the compartment. Barefoot, scratching his ass through grimy gray sweatpants, shuffling through a dank stench that no longer registers, he kicks an oil-stained cardboard box aside and stands before the window. Raising both arms, he slaps his palms flat on the glass and allows himself to look out at it again. Fuck.
Over just a few days, less than a month ago, the day sky went from bright candy apple red to a dull flat crimson, progressively more blood-like in color and texture. All that week it had been streaked with black clouds, scattered, stretching across the sanguine stratosphere like random lines scrawled on a bloody page. He realizes that over the last three days it has been changing even more rapidly, and this evening it has taken on an ominous shade of reddish purple that seems to be deepening before his eyes.
The horizon has been virtually imperceptible for weeks, ever since the last torrid wave came through, smelting another ungodly layer of death upon death. Now it is just a fuzzy white band of sickening haze that is becoming hazier with each passing day. He can see it through the rippling sheets of heat rising from the toxic soup that surrounds what is left of their shrinking, otherworldly piece of wasteland. There is still some difference between night and day, but not enough to matter much to anyone, and it has been a long time since anybody could go outside and expect to come back. Daytime is dark, the night slightly darker, both somehow strangely backlit. They sleep during the day, leaving the challenge of conscious awareness for the night when it is harder to see what’s happening outside.
Across the globe the atmosphere is steadily breaking down, increasingly irradiated, no longer a sufficient UV filter for earthly life. With no real polar ice caps left to deflect the sun’s lethal rays, the Earth is superheating, and it is so hot now that its axis poles are just beginning to shift, with widespread seismic consequences. Volcanic activity has been rising sharply, and even long-dormant volcanos are becoming reactivated. Earthquakes flourish everywhere, triggering each other, setting off unprecedented chain reactions in the equatorial regions, the so-called “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific now literally so and visible from space. Thick, merciless waves of impossible heat are sweeping indiscriminately across the world, and dense clouds of radiation have started to form and maraud around the planet, riding the wind-driven air masses, poisoning what little there is left to poison.
Looking out on the relative calm of what was once the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Donnie is starting to worry about the changes in the horizon and sky of late. He thinks about the sickening walls of ever more toxic heat that have been passing over them in recent weeks, six now by his count. The first five were so slow they didn’t see them approach, instead gradually feeling them by the noticeable rise in the units’ temperature. But he remembers that the last one was moving much faster than the others; this time they could see it coming, and it was thicker, almost opaque. He knows it is only a matter of weeks, maybe days, before the worst of it finally gets around to the North Atlantic and finishes them too, taking all they’ve ever known and all they’ve ever been...
No! His eyes close tightly. He spins around and they open wide with a vigorous shake of his mop, and he returns to treasured escape.
Almost ten minutes pass without a word between them. Lizzie sinks into the couch in despair, just trying to get through the next minute of what she has already decided will be the last night of her life. Donnie is slumped over his table, as usual trying to get even higher. The party’s two other guests of honor, another young woman and a middle-aged man, are on their way up with one guest each along for moral support. They will arrive any time now.
Sniff. Sniff. “Hey! You should put on some tunes, now, babe.”
Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…
Her face drops into her hands. Jesus.
* * *
Seven years after Lizzie’s birth in Daniel’s Harbour, which was just over a year before Donnie appeared, came The Announcement. It was released by the World Health Organization, and it was verified and certified by the International Council for Science, the United Nations Security Council, and all remaining stable governments and jurisdictions. Cruelly issued on Earth Day, 2027, an annual event fast becoming an embarrassing and bitter global joke, its message was short and anything but sweet.
The official document posted online was predictably long, the language overly dense and opaque. Even the live public statement, broadcast everywhere in every known language, seemed to ramble on as though the upshot could be hidden somehow in the long, tedious proclamation, to be digested individually later. But within a couple of hours the pundits and experts at CNN and MSNBC had it all boiled down to one insurmountable fact and one impossible directive.
It was a brutal summary of recent history at a fatal turning point with an all-too-clear vision of what was to come. It said that around the turn of the 21st century humankind officially became the greatest single influence on the planet’s environment, signalling the start of the Anthropocene epoch. The changes it was bringing were becoming unsustainable and coming faster than anyone predicted, already causing unprecedented death and destruction, endangering the planet and all life, including human beings. The empirical evidence was overwhelming and undeniable, at least to the scientists. Primarily due to deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, it was clear that carbon emissions were creating a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, steadily warming the planet, with projections of a global increase in temperature of anywhere from two to six degrees Celsius over the course of the century. This meant certain disaster for the planet and all life it sustains in just decades, including humankind, and the call went out to reduce emissions.
First there was the United Nations’ climate change framework in 1992. Then the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 called on all the industrialized nations of the world to commit to reducing carbon emissions across the board. Twenty years later, in 2017, the Paris Agreement purported to improve on Kyoto. But despite global ratification of these agreements, most nations didn’t come anywhere near the necessary level of emissions reduction. And, thanks to Trump, the U.S. opted out of all agreements over four crucial years before Biden got the chance to try putting it all back on track. The urgency, dedication, and spirit of pro-action to solve the climate change crisis seen during Obama’s second term would never be seen again.
The Announcement proclaimed that, with the ongoing global failure by governments and corporations alike to come together and turn all their talk of carbon emission reductions into significant action, the point of no return had already been reached and surpassed. The critically negative impact humanity had been inflicting on the planet had become irreversible and beyond control. It was accelerating, and the calamitous consequences were unfolding globally at an exponential rate. It advised that conditions for all life would continue to steadily worsen over the next twenty to thirty years, taking life in myriad ways, and that sometime in the 2050s, maybe even sooner, all forms of life would have been wiped off the face of the Earth.
Finally, there was the ineluctable universal directive: henceforth, all thought, energy, and resources expended by all individuals, groups, and governing bodies was to be devoted to one daunting challenge – how best to cope with the plunging quality of human life on an increasingly lethal planet that could no longer be saved. Citizens were asked to please consider others under the circumstances and to conduct themselves as rationally and lawfully as possible. The statement finished by plainly stating that there was nothing further to report at that time and that updates would be issued as needed. No alternatives were given, there could be no objections or arguments, and it offered no instructions or recommendations whatsoever on how exactly they should “cope”.
* * *
Lizzie looks down at the dirty water in the bathroom sink, up to the mirror, and back down to the water. Disgusting. She knows the washing water will have to be changed soon but realizes that it’s just another task Donnie will have to do for himself from now on. She pictures him living alone in the apartment; it instantly puts her face to face with the transience of her own life and her impending death just hours from now. She shudders.
Water is gold in 2049, especially drinking water. The plumbing in the residential complex started acting up soon after it was built, and it needed repairs more and more often until it broke down for good in early 2048. Now there are no working toilets or running water, and the last overstocking of bottled water for all residents, well over a year ago, came by boat. The plumbing was already gone by then and they knew it would be the last delivery. Now the water supply is severely depleted, even though attrition has meant fewer people needing it, and the black rainwater is poison. The facility is virtually inaccessible, almost empty, with nobody left to fill vacancies.
It has been a long time since anyone could justify using water for a bath or shower. Lizzie and Donnie have been using and reusing a small amount of wash water captured in the bathroom sink for all personal hygiene, each keeping their own personal washcloth and towel. Donnie has rigged up a crude filtering system in the corner of the bathroom with some cheesecloth and a couple of ten-gallon buckets. They use a minimum of soap and the same water for as long as they can stand before filtering it, wiping out the sink and putting it back. Lizzie always needs it changed sooner than Donnie, so she almost always ends up doing it herself. She resents this and regularly complains, but he no longer hears her when she does.
When it becomes unfilterable and unusable for personal hygiene, the washing water is used to wash a few items of clothes, but only when necessary. Then it contributes to a water supply they keep for an even more repulsive toileting system. This vile procedure became necessary after the plumbing started to go, after they could no longer endure defecating in the toilets, sinks, and bathtubs of unoccupied apartments and those of the dead without using water to do so. Eventually they had to seal up the main doors of these apartments with duct tape. With opportunistic cockroaches and rats taking over, whole levels of the complex became health hazards that had to be sealed up and ruled completely off limits.
He looks at the time, then to Lizzie coming out of the bathroom as if in a trance. “It’s after midnight,” he says, almost whispering.
She scuffs her way over to the sink in the kitchenette, irritable, her old, knitted slippers scraping over the tiles. “They’re coming.”
“Well, I know that!” He catches himself and tries to calm, copping a lighter attitude. “Where else are they gonna go, right?”
She ignores his feeble wit and chuckle, aimlessly opening a cupboard door. “I wish we had some real food tonight.” She slams the cupboard door and it bangs back half open. She stands there staring at the loose knob, just barely hanging on like she is. Yeah right.
Her head droops then promptly bobs back up with the putrid smell emanating from the broken garburator. Holy fuck! She turns her head away with a tortured mouth. “Could you possibly do something about that, Donnie?”
He is suddenly standing behind her, his hands light on her shoulders. It startles her and she gasps, a tightly wound ball of nerves. He rubs her shoulders gently, and she feels his breath through the hair on the back of her neck. “Ssshhhhh…”
Her shoulders relax under his hands then stiffen again as she stops an impulse to turn. “Donnie, I’m not….”
“Ssshhhh…” The shoulders slowly relax again, and she lies back against his chest. He hears her breathing, and he can feel it, each drawn breath a gasp, each expelled breath a plaintive sob. It conjures his own sorrow in a rush of emotion, and he begins to wilt.
“What is…this?” she ventures. He is so rarely this way.
“Nothing…nothing, babe.” He squeezes her shoulders tenderly, his unexpected show of affection surprising them both, and he hears himself say: “I’m really gonna miss you, Lizzie, ya know? A lot… That’s all.”
Softening. “I know, Donnie, I know.” She wells up as she turns around in his arms, lower lip quivering, her chin collapsing in on itself. He hates to see her cry, but it is so endearing when her chin does that.
Impulsively he pulls her closer, and she knows something is coming. “Look, babe. I… I know this is… you know, the last big dance or whatever for you…”
Don’t. Her finger to his lips. “Stop, Donnie.”
He pushes on, but he is winging it and she is becoming rigid in his arms. “It’s just that you always take everything so… so… well, angrily, you know? So miserable, and…”
She tears herself away, but he doesn’t reach after her and she is back facing her sofa chair. “You can fuck right off now, Donnie,” she mutters, then turns and flops down in a pile, a pitiful picture of desperation and dread.
“All I’m saying is… It kills me to see you like that. Tonight, I just want…”
“You want?!” She is venomous. Fuck!
He shrugs then pads his way back to the table and his base of operations. “I’ll never understand it.” He kicks a discarded sneaker, and his ass needs scratching again. Sitting down, he picks up the card and starts moving powder around again, shaking his head. “Shit, you’d think I would… I mean, it’s like… Ahh, never mind.”
* * *
Though he was also born in Newfoundland in another little community on the west coast of the province, Donnie’s route to their present was an entirely different journey from Lizzie’s. He is eight years her junior. But those eight included the last six years of global complacency and foot-dragging on the climate crisis, and the first two years of humanity’s desperate, disgusting efforts to come to grips with The Announcement.
They were the first frightening years of humanity learning to comprehend the inescapable, devastating fact of what their collective action, then inaction, had wrought, of trying to adjust to it, and so very poorly. It was an alternate human reality wholly other than on every level. For all intents and purposes, when Lizzie was eight years old and enjoying a relatively normal childhood growing up in Daniel’s Harbour, innocent and oblivious to the symphony of global crises arising all around her, Donnie was born on another planet.
Donald Rayfield Tobin was born in 2028 by caesarian section in the town of Stephenville. He came out screaming and swinging like he knew just what kind of world awaited him. From the day he appeared, Donnie made a life of being critical, opposing everything and everyone he encountered along the way. He grew up feisty, decidedly tough, never shrinking from a challenge, starting half the fights he got into, goading others into starting the other half. No doubt about it – Donnie Tobin was a couple of handfuls.
The difference between Lizzie’s childhood and Donnie’s was hope – more precisely the lack of it, in Donnie’s case and in the case of his whole generation. Humanity had been too cavalier and self-involved to heed science’s instructions on how to prevent it, much less come together in a concerted common effort to do something substantial about it. Born after everybody in the world had already heard and comprehended The Announcement, Donnie’s generation was raised by forlorn parents paralyzed with guilt. Like everyone else, they were desperately trying and failing to attain something resembling a normal life. Resigned to the inevitable descent like everyone else, they carried the added crippling burden of having given life to children who could only meet horrific ends and grow up knowing that they would.
In the years leading up to The Announcement the press was more concerned than ever with reporting only what people wanted to know, only what they could handle. Most people only tuned into media and news sources they liked, insofar as they cared, and many more gave up watching the news altogether. They lost touch wilfully, preferring to insulate themselves from reality and everyone else inside a solipsistic bubble of self-delusion. The climate crisis and looming catastrophe, therefore, went relatively under-reported considering the critical importance of the issue, and so went largely unheeded.
Complicating things everywhere was the growing prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, with an increasing number of people accusing anyone holding a contrary position of spreading “fake news”. It was getting harder and harder to trust anyone or depend on the veracity of anything. For the pitifully small percentage of people who still managed to hold onto some measure of objectivity through to and on into the 2020s, from where they sat, the greatest casually of the early 21st century was truth.
All the dystopian movies and TV shows that were so prevalent in the early 21st century lulled generations of people into a dangerously disconnected relationship with death and dying. It amounted to an apathetic acceptance of all possible negative realities, all possible ways to die, and all possible ways for everyone to die. There were so many such depictions that the public became inured to any kind of disastrous end, subconsciously chalking it all up to artistic imagination and sensationalism. Oblivious, whistling past the graveyard, they were wholly unprepared for the real thing when it finally came.
~~~~~
In the afterword to The Dying Party, Kelland explains that this book (which I hesitate to call a novel) is intended to generate awareness of the climate crisis, and he promises to donate all proceeds from this book to the Climate Emergency Fund, which according to the organization’s website “raise[s] funds for and make[s] grants to the disruptive nonviolent climate movement.” I cannot fault Kelland for his environmental concerns, but The Dying Party fails as fiction.
The book would be all dying and no party if not for an inane caricature of the Chinese Communist Party. Spending most of the book listing the errors of human civilization from Trump onward, Kelland largely ignores the development of plot, character, and aesthetics. Where characters do appear, they mostly reinforce that humanity is beyond redemption and undeserving of consolation, of which this book provides none to readers. The Dying Party, in short, substitutes doom-and-gloom news headlines for fiction.
In addition to Trump, the book includes superficial references to Covid-19, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Xi Jinping, and just about every international organization apart from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the only one that actually required mention). After each onslaught of political commentary, any attempt at humour or character development is most welcome, but the few passages that aspire to the condition of fiction are spoiled by racist details, as when describing how two characters were “[h]eartily cheered on by the boisterous, backslapping natives, prodigious drinkers all ... .”
Later, a minor Chinese character puns of the “slant” the world has taken since the Chinese took total control. Proud of his joke, Kelland adds, “Slant, Colbourne! Slant! Get it?” In a book with so little character detail and such transparent narration the separation of author and narrator provides little defence to textual racism. Giving no indication that the narrator is flawed, unreliable, or anything but a conduit for his own opinions, Kelland bears responsibility for this book’s racism.
If any more evidence is needed to justify a one-star review, then consider the narrator’s following comment about Colbourne: “He is disgusted with himself and his entire species, sick to his stomach.” Apart from nailing the book’s utterly cynical tone, the cliche here is communicated by a run-on sentence that falls just short of a comma splice because the second clause is a sentence fragment. Fortunately, I am not required to provide line edits for the entire book, which is full of grammatical errors.
We need well-written fiction that helps us deal with climate change. The Dying Party would exploit that need to raise money for climate activism. I recommend instead seeking serious climate fiction elsewhere and donating directly to your environmental non-profit of choice.