The companion novel to the international best-seller ‘The Whale at the End of the World’

When young idealist Tom publicly humiliates politician Monty in a Cornish pub, it sparks a simmering feud that cascades through their intertwined lives. The consequences of their argument, and the deadly wager they strike, will cascade down the decades. Years later, they find themselves a long way from St Piran onto a colossal iceberg drifting south away from Greenland, their only companion a starving polar bear.

This is a heart-stopping tale of anger, tragedy, and enduring love, cast against the long unfolding backdrop of an irreversible global crisis.

The first duty of any author is to tell a good story, to enthral the reader with the characters and their dilemmas, without hectoring them with some overt message. Through the lives and travails of his two main characters, progressive minded student Tom Horsmith and career minded conservative politician Montague Causley, Ironmonger delivers on this duty with brilliant effectiveness.

Early in the book the mismatched pair butt heads in a beautifully rendered bar room argument. In the distinctive voice of his omniscient narrator, Ironmonger gives the reader a richly textured scene full of whimsy and character as mutual antagonism builds to the laying of the eponymous bet. Of course, the scene is captured on cell phone video and ends up going viral trapping both characters in the snare of their own long-lived wager.

Over the fifty-year lifespan of the bet, we glimpse the characters in a series of discrete episodes that catch nodal points in how their lives play out and intertwine. Ironmonger avoids the self-imposed constraint of visiting the same day and doing so every year as David Nicholls did in One Day, which allows him to develop each episode as much or as little as it needs in a string of what could be interconnected short stories.

One episode depicts a single brilliant day of discovering love. Another shows weeks of careerist manoeuvring and environmental work. The key episode zooms in on a few days of tense and dramatic vying with the elements for survival.

While James Bradley’s episodic cli-fi novel Clade, covering the same multi-decade outrun of the climate crisis, it had a range of characters to illustrate the challenges of the future. Ironmonger’s tight focus on his two main characters ensures the story has a satisfyingly complete pair of character arcs. Where Clade wondered across the world in its settings, Ironmonger’s smaller range of locales allows him to show the glacial wilderness of Greenland and the threatened cosiness of the Cornish village of St. Piran in vivid detail.

There is a wonderful versatility to Ironmonger’s prose as he shifts effortlessly between omniscient narrator and third-person limited perspectives. Reading the wager inciting encounter in the pub is like listening to a genial uncle recounting the tale while you both sit by a roaring log fire. In the moments of intense desperation we are brought more closely into each character’s head as they are tossed about on the whim of the elements.

There is a writing ‘rule’ that beginning writers will be familiar with – that they must ‘show not tell’ – they must avoid the cardinal sin of exposition. In the TV show Game of Thrones passages of exposition were dressed up as ‘action’ in sex scenes, which some labelled as ‘sexplanation’. However, like most writing rules, ‘show don’t tell’ is more guide than commandment and, to take inspiration from Frank Carson, with sections of exposition the trick lies in ‘the way you tell ‘em’. Where Ironmonger does ‘tell’ the reader stuff around character’s back stories and relationships, the lyrical prose ensures those sections are a joy to read.

There were many lines I tagged in my kindle, for the beautiful images or evocative  capture of a thought or a moment. Here are a few.

Every room was as soulless as a hotel corridor.

Thus quickly, sometimes, love comes into our lives unannounced. It isn’t always an interloper. It doesn’t always duel with our wits and our emotions. It doesn’t always make unreasonable demands of us. Sometimes love will come and stand beside us to watch a sunrise.

Jason wiped the bar with a cloth. He wiped it again. He was a man fully able to decipher the complex language of unspoken sighs from solitary drinkers at a bar. This is a skill set that barmen possess. ‘Is it a girl?’ he asked.

Big icebergs typically calve from great glaciers like disobedient slices of bread peeling away from the side of a loaf.

While there are truths that Horsmith (and through him Ironmonger) definitely wants to speak to power, the novel is generous to both its main characters. This is no simplistic tale of impossibly heroic protagonists and irretrievably venal antagonists. The narrative interrogates the damage they both do to each other and explores their past woes and present pressures with a light that is illuminating without being excoriating. Ironmonger’s narrative effortlessly shifts pace as the story requires, at times elegantly bucolic, at others viscerally gripping.

In Flight Behaviour Kingsolver’s focus on the plight of Monarch butterflies enabled her to examine a range of climate change issues through the lens of a threat to one fragile species. In a similar way Ironmonger’s focus on the dwindling glaciers of Greenland has a reach beyond that massive, misnamed island, a geographical focus which feels quite topical in the current political climate. Short-sighted imperialism might see in Greenland simply a strategic and commercial opportunity, as the melting ice both liberates mineral reserves and also emphasizes its position athwart an emerging North-West Passage/trans-polar trade route. However, Ironmonger points out the key role Greenland plays in moderating our climate through the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) which ensures that London – at the same latitude as Calgary in Alberta – has a winter temperature about 12oC higher than the Canadian city. As Horsmith puts it

‘This fantastically large block of ice acts as an air-conditioner for our whole planet. It stops us getting too hot. But by creating the gulf stream, it also stops us getting too cold. We are so lucky to have this amazing place. But its future is now in our hands.’

Of course this is a work of climate change fiction, though soon all contemporary near future fiction will have to be climate change fiction. To read such a novel without seeing a reference to climate change would be like reading one set in the 1940s that made no mention of the Second World War. It is the defining issue of our times and literature is tackling it more honestly and robustly than many of our political leaders.

In the initial bar room row, and the wager that ensues, Ironmonger captures some of the frustration at political inaction, media underreporting and fossil fuel funded misinformation that I and many others feel. That sense of being locked out of the debate, of having voices of reason and expertise pushed aside, while narratives of absurdity are uncritically purveyed on our flagship news programmes.

Who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to confront a politician and climate change denier with the criminal negligence of their posturing?  What would I say if given a few moments of time with the likes of Richard Tice, or Steve Baker in a bar? I like to think I’d be as passionate and coherent in seizing that opportunity as Tom Horsmith was with Montague Causley.

Of course, Climate Change is a crisis that is affecting everyone with heat bubbles, flooding, extreme weather events as we approach tipping points that will take us beyond even what science can confidently predict. But the out-turns of the climate crisis are so great that no single novel can capture them accurately. If the climate crisis is the elephant in the room that politicians and media ignore or downplay then authors trying to depict it can each give us only a partial view of what might happen – the elephant’s foot, or ear, or trunk if you will.

Ironmonger makes some hard-hitting climate observations and highlights the woefully inadequate response of our political leaders even as they trumpet that they are doing something.

‘You’re the driver of a bus, Mr Causley, a bus packed full of people, stalled on a railway line at a level crossing with an immense freight train racing full tilt towards you, and you’ve been using the precious seconds to adjust your rear-view mirror.’

However, the book doesn’t touch so much on the mass of misinformation and corporate lobbying (aka purchase of political power) that has turbocharged all the dangers of climate change.

We can still do much to ameliorate the damage climate change will do, but the grip of the fossil-fuel and petro-state lobbies on the levers of political power and the media agendas is the fatal weakness afflicting our climate strategy. The multi-layered strategy of what Michael Mann calls ‘climate inactivism’ has levels of denial from which the indignant, the apathetic and the fearful can pick and choose as usefully as they might select a circle of hell. Just pick your poison

1. climate change is a hoax, it’s just not happening;
2. climate change is happening but it’s natural, not man-made;
3. climate change is happening and is man-made but it’s not an urgent worry;
4. climate change is an urgent worry but there are more urgent issues like poverty and inequality (that the same lobby have significantly contributed to as a strategy of distraction);
5. climate change is an urgent worry that we must do something about, but the fossil fuel industry has the technology and power to be the ones to solve the problem (that they caused) (see also BS Carbon Capture and Storage schemes);
6. climate change is an urgent worry, but it’s too late to do anything, we must just all seal our borders against climate change refugees.
7. well at least the billionaires can retreat to their fortified redoubts defended by private security forces,
8. oh shit

The modern mainstream media working in the service of fossil fuel interests to deaden popular outrage and demands or action, are like Wormtongue whispering Saruman’s poison in Theoden’s ear, and I wonder whence we might find a Gandalf to drive out such treachery and embolden the popular drive to action that we can and should take.

As Timothy Morton put it, Climate change is a hyperobject, vast in its impact and entangled in its interconnections. No single work of climate change fiction can tackle the many heads of this particular hydra, especially while also telling a good story.

Ironmonger’s entertaining tale does much to inform, delivering some new truths about Earth’s pre-history even to those of us who have read a lot of cli-fi. Hopefully, it will also stimulate some readers to think about what they action they can take and to educate themselves more widely about the unregulated capitalism that has got us into this mess and which seems determined to keep us here.

The Wager and the Bear is available now, you can order your copy HERE