Future life on earth

The most sought-after literary prize for English literature in the UK is the Booker Prize. It is awarded to books written originally in English and published in Britain or Ireland. The winning book this year is Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, in which the author ponders Earth’s beauty and fragility. The theme has particular poignancy now that we seem determined to destroy the planet.

The book’s subject is important, but so is the prize itself. The Booker Prize-winner takes home US$64,000. The money is one thing, but, more importantly, the prize also changes the writer’s life beyond anything they could have imagined. Every professional opportunity opens up to them, from lucrative publishing deals, film adaptations, Rolex ambassadorships, professorships at prestigious universities, board chairmanships, huge advances on their new books, guaranteed big marketing expenditure on their new work, to invitations to every literary festival in the world that can afford first-class air travel, and much more in between. And since most writers cannot live by writing alone, it brings time for relaxation, holidays, the end to ruinous mortgages and even better health. Winning that prize is every writer’s dream.

The Booker has courted many controversies, including notoriety for having only male winners, which led to the establishment in 1996 of the Women’s Prize (previously called the Orange Prize for Fiction, after the corporate sponsor) to recognise women writers and promote their work.

As an aside, two Trinidadian women have so far been shortlisted for that prize, Monique Roffey and Lisa Allen-Agostini (both previous winners of various Bocas Lit Fest prizes), and Jamaican Safiya Sinclair this year, who also won the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Interestingly, five of the six 2024 Booker Prize shortlisted titles were by women, including the very first winner of the Orange Prize, Anne Michaels.

To date and since its inception in 1969, the Booker (for fiction and previously called the Man Booker Prize) has been won by only two Caribbean writers, VS Naipaul and Marlon James. Dozens of other new Commonwealth writers have been nominated, which is to say the prize is not short on themes of very different experiences of life as lived by far away communities and individuals and they have stood up to strong scrutiny and competition, many of the books having been shortlisted.

The 2024 Booker Prize winner was named last week. Orbital was not the favourite. The bookies had their money on James, the African-American Percival Everett’s reworking of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s great American classic, to tell the story from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.

I would like to speculate that although the judges are guided only by the quality of the writing and the accomplishment of the writer in telling the story, Orbital’s theme, in light of the existential threat to mankind of you-would-have-thought undeniable climate change, influenced their reaction to the winning novel in a very primordial way. If you accept that we are mere animals, of a higher order, admittedly, then we must have very urgent and basic survival instincts. Everett’s masterpiece was out of tune with man’s current major preoccupation – our future life on this planet.

News coming out of the continuing COP29 international climate conference in Azerbaijan is mixed. Most countries have missed their reduced emission targets, but the biggest polluter, China, has lowered its fossil-fuel-energy capacity from two-thirds to less than half its power-generation capacity, and there seems to be early agreement that the rich world must help mitigate the effects of record high temperatures in poor countries.

This year will be the hottest year in history and natural disasters are becoming commonplace everywhere, yet many governments do not have full support for climate-change reduction policies at home, and the ravages of war, globally, are low down on the climate agenda.

News out of Washington is bad. US President-elect Trump has made some mind-boggling bizarre appointments to top jobs in his government-in-waiting, so we can expect he will keep

every threat he made on the campaign trail. “Frack, baby, frack!” and “Drill, baby, drill,” are nightmarish slogans to the ears of not only particularly endangered small island states such as those of the Caribbean, but to all countries that are experiencing floods, drought and famine. We have to see if big business will be in a position to do as he encourages, but the door is wide open to them.

Experts differ on whether Trump will really withdraw the world’s second largest polluter from the Paris Agreement. That uncertainty hangs over COP29, too.

And at home, we are suffering from inertia. Where are the impactful government and Caricom initiatives to re-educate the public environmentally or instruct all-important small businesses how to prepare for climate disasters? The low-polluting world is right to ask the industrial world to fund renewable energies, but we should make our own efforts at survival. We could start by prohibiting building in flood-prone areas, stopping erosion and the polluting of our waterways and feeding ourselves more. But I guess a mad race for the biblical Ark when the time comes is more appealing.