June 8, 2022

Night in the World, by Sharon English

“There’s so much to learn—and to unlearn. It’s urgent yet can’t be rushed. The world stands on the edge of losses so radical no one can fathom the consequences, while possibilities for reconnection and renewal wait to be discovered in the dark.”

I don’t want to read your climate change fiction, that novel you wrote about children afloat on a raft as the world is overwhelmed by sea. I don’t want to read about your desolate prairie wasteland, about drought, about despair, about the impossibility of a habitable future. And not because I don’t think that the climate crisis is pressing and real, but because I know that it is, and I know your post-apocalyptic fiction isn’t going to do anything to ameliorate that reality, or lessen my anxiety. Perhaps also because I don’t think I believe in apocalypse at all, but instead that in the midst of disaster, ordinary life goes on—babies are born, flowers grow, people do their best, and help one another. Reality is not so stark. The story, as always, is complicated.

And this is the kind of story that Sharon English—celebrated author of two acclaimed short story collections—has decided to tell in her debut novel Night in the World, a novel whose disaster setting feels a lot like now, and why shouldn’t it? Freak storms knock out power grids, water levels are rising, toxins are mucking up the waterways, and anyone who speaks out against the pervasiveness of, say, fluoride in drinking water is just dismissed as loony toons. Entire species are being eradicated as their habitats are destroyed in pursuit of profit and development, few people pushing back against the status quo, underlining its unsustainability.

Night in the World is the story of a pair of brothers, one a successful restaurant-owner who finds his middle years are drained of meaning, the other a former environmental journalist who’s thrown it all away for a job that seems less futile, helping to run a gym in East Toronto. And the third character at the centre this story is a late blooming grad student who lives in Peterborough, and is studying moth species around the shores of Rice Lake, and elsewhere, trying to find a way to do her research without damaging the fragile creatures she’s pursuing. Is a little harm excusable if it’s the name of a greater cause?

The novel traces the lines of Toronto’s waterways, the creeks and rivers underlying the modern city, stories that refuse to stay buried, as well as the ever-shifting shores of the Toronto Islands, formerly a peninsula until a storm cut them off from the city more than a 150 years ago, and Rice Lake, an important agricultural spot for Indigenous people…until the radical disruption of the Trent Severn Waterway, all of this conjuring moth’s more colourful cousins, and what can happen when one of them flaps its wings. The infinite ways in which every little thing is connected.

“This novel was over a decade in the making,” English writes in her acknowledgements, and I will admit that sometimes it reads as such, the story big and sprawling with many disparate parts that sometimes fit together awkwardly. In terms of plot, there’s nothing taut, and I wouldn’t say that it’s a great novel, but instead that it’s a very good and wholly worthwhile book, a book packed beautiful sentences and details so fascinating I kept reading facts aloud (the part about the cicadas!), bursting with research, and ideas, and questions, poetry and philosophy.