Bringing together the insights of ecocriticism and narratology in an overdue marriage she calls (following Erin James) “econarratology” in Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke considers what stories contemporary British fictions are telling about the natural world. Proceeding from the assumption that the stories we tell reflect, and shape in turn, our experience and understanding of our earthly habitat—a habitat at this point increasingly marked by the manifold impacts of climate change—Bracke invites us to observe more closely four recurring narrative tropes ordering literary representations of nature: environmental collapse, the pastoral, urban nature, and polar exploration. Taking each of these tropes in turn, Bracke examines three “postmillenial” British novels (largely uncited by previous ecocritics) in which a key trope is in play. Each trope, Bracke argues, in its revised, compromised, or reinvigorated twenty-first-century iteration, plays a part in a collective imaginative effort to make sense of the climate crisis and what it means for natural environments and their life-sustaining potential. But postmillenial fictions are not only “narratives of loss” steeped in “econostalgia,” suggests Bracke, “they are explicitly also about change and a productive rather than merely mournful response to nature, suggesting novel means by which to engage with the non-human natural world other than defeatism in the face of climate crisis” (136–37).

This is a neatly organized book, well researched and carefully composed. The twelve novels discussed include Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004; environmental collapse), Wish You Were Here (Graham Swift, 2011; pastoral), NW (Zadie Smith, 2012; urban nature), The North Water (Ian McGuire, 2016; polar) and The Carhullan Army (Sarah Hall, 2007; environmental collapse). In chapter 1, Bracke considers the relative edge that narratives of (gradual, incremental) environmental collapse have over outrightly apocalyptic tellings in situating crisis on “the smaller scale of human understanding” and in a space-time meaningfully continuous with the readers’ own (46). Concerned with fiction's potential to shape readers’ awareness of their surrounds and even to lead them to “act on” it, Bracke's argument, even while it draws attention to issues of narrativity and reflexivity, risks tethering itself to a somewhat conservative estimation of humans’ imaginative capacities (so that a “principle of minimal departure” from a known place or present best allows a novel to “bring home” the crisis), rather than exploring the powers literature might have, say, to disturb what counts as “human.” In her second chapter, Bracke reflects on “pastoral traces” in novels—elements that may belong to the city but appear suddenly or incongruously in a rural setting (and vice versa), suggesting the narrative unreliability or corruption of the motif of nature as “retreat.” Some interesting pages describe a shift from productive to aesthetic conceptions of the countryside, as traditional rural agriculture declines. Bracke's argument connects profitably here (but the connections are for the reader to make) with that of Isabelle Stenger in In Catastrophic Times (2015) or that of historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016): indeed the pastoral as “narrative” merits serious materialist critique in light of the severe challenges faced today by soils and crops. The pastoral's dark narrative obverse, as the nineteenth century has given way to the twentieth and then to our own, has surely been the most powerful macro-narrative of this period, that of increasingly industrialized, large-scale, intensive, patent-based, carbon-fueled, agrochemical capitalism. Does the modern pastoral not emerge, in a sense, as a kind of supplement to—a fantasy of, or a mirage produced by—industrialization?

Bracke is not given to Baudrillardian provocations. Her discussion of urban nature in chapter 3 seeks, on the contrary, to continue to unsettle easy oppositions between nature and the city, and to invite a serious consideration of the ambivalent, nontraditional character of the postmillenial experience of nature. Among other useful notions from ecocriticism, urban studies, and genre/narrative theory that are brought into conversation here (such as urban ecology, edgelands, the wilderness paradox, projective versus topological locations, space versus place, fabula versus syuzhet), the most generative involves the ecology of food, which constitutes, after all, historically, the most vital aspect of urban relations to “nature.” As those relations are compromised, writes Bracke, “[a]lternative food practices and related networks” (farmers’ markets, city co-ops, farm-to-table movements, and the like) represent new “situated and corporeal ways of relating to nature” (97). Here again Bracke declines to address directly the role of global agro-business and market capitalism (and historically, thereby, of British imperialism) in promoting mass monoculture and deforestation; destroying subsistence farming; depleting groundwater levels; and producing nutritional deficiency, dependence, waste, famines, and food deserts—indeed, in industrializing food production on a scale so massive that today no less than 25 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions are from agriculture (with food's transport accounting for another 10 percent). Perhaps the argument seemed to Bracke too predictable to include in a book about climate crisis—or overly negative in a book reconsidering concepts “deemed problematic by ecocritics” and make them “productive” (139)—but certainly it bears repeating as the climate-change-denying far-right gains ground in both postmillenial Britain, where these novels are set, and the Netherlands, where Bracke writes (not to mention in the country where this forlorn reviewer writes).

The book's last and most engaging chapter considers the North and South poles as critical and uncanny sites in a historically shifting dynamic. Long a canvas for nationalism, exploration, and heroic masculinity, the polar landscape is now in twenty-first-century British fictions the poignantly frail frontline of climate change—melting snowcaps, imperiled polar bears. Still, at these haunted edges of the world, as Bracke observes astutely, contemporary environmentalism (especially exemplified by ecotourism) may not be in total rupture with imperialist nostalgia—both are “concerned with the postmortem quality of a species, a concern with what has been lost, or is about to be lost” (128).

Bracke's book is one that students of contemporary literature and ecocriticism stand to learn from both in matter and method. At its strongest Bracke offers, without seeming to know it, a substantive riposte to Amitav Ghosh's gloomy verdict, in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), that the serious novel is constitutively unable to address climate change.