Dystopian future of Edan Lepucki’s California conveys a presence

ALTHOUGH often thought of as cautionary tales, post-apocalyptic narratives are rarely interested in what brought about the end of the world.

California by Edan Lepucki Picture: Supplied

ALTHOUGH often thought of as cautionary tales, post-apocalyptic narratives are rarely interested in the question of what exactly brought about the end of the world. Their focus is on those left behind and the world they inhabit. Images of emptied and silent landscapes offer a backdrop against which we might rehearse anxieties about the future.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise therefore that the latest addition to this crowded field, California, the debut novel of American writer Edan Lepucki, doesn’t linger on the past, at least in a macro sense.

The novel gestures towards a string of catastrophic climactic events, increasing economic stratification and general social breakdown to paint a portrait of a US that has largely collapsed. The rich live in heavily defended communities where children play on tree-lined streets while their parents take courses in art and yoga, while the poor survive in the violent ruins of the cities.

Against this background the novel centres on two characters, Cal and Frida, a married couple who have fled the increasingly dangerous streets of Los Angeles for the backwoods of ­California. There they have managed to carve out something that at least resembles a life, growing their own food and trading with an ­elusive pedlar named August.

Yet despite the hand-to-mouth nature of their existence, there is something curiously temporary and unreal about their life in the forest, a sense neither is properly equipped for the world they inhabit. With little to do, they spend whole days in bed making love, yet simultaneously they seem trapped, grieving for their lost pasts yet unable to move forward.

That changes when Frida discovers she is pregnant. Realising they cannot rear the baby on their own, the couple decides to try to make contact with whoever lives beyond the Spikes, a maze of ominous sculptures two days’ hike from their home.

It’s a decision complicated by the threat of gangs of raiders known as the Pirates who ­maraud through the area from time to time, and by August’s warnings about the dangers of seeking to make contact with others. On reaching the Spikes, they discover others are defending an area known simply as the Land, inhabited by a community of runaways and refugees similar to themselves.

Although these people are not exactly welcoming, they are not overtly hostile either; yet, as rapidly becomes clear, that is because their leadership is dominated by figures drawn from a shadowy Weather Underground-style political organisation known as the Group.

As its post-apocalyptic trappings and taste for the transformation of its narrative elements into proper nouns that gesture towards more abstract ideas (the Land, the Spikes, the Group) suggest, California self-consciously positions itself in the same tradition as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, in which the fantastical elements provide a symbolic language with which to satirise and explore elements of contemporary society.

Yet these connections are also slightly misleading. For as Cal and Frida begin to adapt to life on the Land, a place in which the semblance of communal decision disguises the brutal enforcement of its leadership’s edicts, it becomes clear that, as its title suggests, California is as much about the fantasies of political extremism and social control as it is about the end of the world.

It’s an interesting combination, and one made more potent not just by the blandly sinister behaviour of the Land’s leadership but by Lepucki’s sure control of language and occasional flashes of humour. (In a rather delightful piece of Oedipal score-settling, Cal notices a book on a shelf at one point and asks in amazement, “A Bereavement? Franzen’s posthumous novel?”)

The effect is diminished somewhat by her less certain control of narrative pace, and the sometimes uneasy fit between the particularity and care with which the foreground is evoked and the slightly abstract air of background elements such as the Communities and the political landscape of her future America.

Yet, in a way, what is most striking about California is not its depiction of its ruined world or of the sinister machinations of the Group but its portrait of Cal and Frida’s sheer inadequacy as human beings.

Set adrift in a world without technology or prescribed roles, they do not rise to the challenge. They remain as self-absorbed and solipsistic as they were before the world went to hell, sulking and bickering and making bad choices left, right and centre. And while they do eventually stumble into a sort of safety, their embrace of the certainty offered by its material comfort and clear social controls serves only to underline how unconsoling is the novel’s larger vision of who we are.

James Bradley’s new novel, Clade, will be published by Penguin next year.

California

By Edan Lepucki

Hachette Australia, 400pp, $29.99