John Ironmonger was born and grew up in East Africa. He has a doctorate in zoology, and was once an expert on freshwater leeches. He is the author of The Good Zoo Guide and the novels The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder (shortlisted for the 2012 Costa First Novel Prize and the Guardian‘s Not the Booker Prize), The Coincidence Authority and The Whale at the End of the World (an international bestseller). He has also been part of a world record team for speed reading Shakespeare, has driven across the Sahara in a £100 banger, and once met Jared Diamond in a forest in the middle of Sumatra.

TO: We are joined today at the Hive by John Ironmonger. John is a prize-winning author with internationally best-selling novels including The Coincidence Authority and Not Forgetting the Whale to his name. He is here to talk with us about his latest novel The Wager and the Bear which was released in the UK by Fly on the Wall Press this February. You can read our hive review of it here.  The Wager and the Bear is described as a companion novel to Not Forgetting the Whale as both feature the delightful setting and people of the fictional Cornish village of St. Piran, named for a saint that the Cornwall Heritage Trust describe as ‘the merriest, hardest-drinking, hardest living holy man Cornwall ever knew.’

Thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions John. I have something of a personal interest in climate change fiction (cli-fi), as followers of my Unseen Academic feature will know, so the premise of The Wager and the Bear was very much up my street. I really enjoyed your take on the cli-fi theme (I feel the term and crisis transcend the idea of a genre). In your acknowledgements you say that the novel started with an idea came from your agent, though it developed and deviated somewhat in the writing.

Can you tell us a bit more about how the book came about and what took you and its characters in directions as far afield as Greenland?

JI: Well first – thank you so much for having me; it’s a real pleasure to be part of this project. And thank you for making me aware of the Cornwall Heritage Trust’s quotation about St Piran; I have never come across this before, but I am rather pleased to discover that the great saint accommodated most of the qualities of the inhabitants of the fictional village.

There is a long answer to this question – and a shorter one. (I will try to find some middle ground.)

Over a curry, one evening in Carlisle, I told my long-suffering agent, ‘Stan,’ that I wanted to write a novel dealing with the climate crisis. I had written a novella (The Year of the Dugong) which imagined a future world where most of our familiar animals were now extinct; but I was struggling with a good concept for a longer climate story. Stan, meanwhile, was keen for a second St Piran novel; ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ had sold well and it seemed like a good idea to conserve some of that momentum. After our curry he wrote me an email pitching the story of an iceberg that floated down from Greenland and now blocked Piran harbour. ‘It could be a bit like Local Hero,’ he suggested.

Well, it wasn’t a great idea but it doesn’t do to ignore propositions from your agent. So, I sat down to write a first chapter just to please him, and blow me if this didn’t lead to a second, and then a third, and that’s exactly the point where most novels either take off or flounder.

I rarely write with much of a story in mind. Like Lawrence Stern I write the first sentence and I ‘trust to almighty God for the rest.’ Sometimes this works. More often it doesn’t. But the idea of the wager was too compelling to abandon and already the characters had legs and the story wouldn’t let me go. It was never going to be about an iceberg blocking Piran harbour, but I knew the iceberg would need to appear somehow, and at some point in the writing I stumbled across the narrative potential of stranding the two warring characters on an iceberg where they would need to cooperate or perish. And that was really all it needed. I had to find a way to get Tom and Monty to Greenland.

TO: Through the pages of The Wager and the Bear there comes a rich appreciation of Cornwall and its people, but you don’t describe yourself as a Cornishman.

Could you give us a bit of backstory about your connection to Cornwall and your feelings about the county?

JI: As an Englishman you are generally expected to have a county affiliation, but it has always been a bit tough for me. ‘Where are you from?’ people will ask, and I will struggle to answer. I was born in Nairobi, and grew up in Kenya. I went to school in Kent and I have lived and worked in several counties. Today I live in Cheshire. My father was a Londoner, but my Cornish connections come from my mother; she grew up in Mevagissey – a village on the south coast of Cornwall. When I was seventeen my father retired from his job in Nairobi; he bought the village shop in Mevagissey, and we all moved to live above the store. It was an unpleasant shock for me, as a teenager, to find myself in this quiet place so far from the bright lights of the city; but very quickly I grew to love it. When you work in the village shop you get to know everybody very quickly. For a long time I wanted to write about this experience and about the community I discovered in this remote little place. I haven’t lived in Cornwall for a long time now, but when I’m asked I will still say I’m Cornish. I have family there. And I feel as if I belong there. And that is surely the most important thing.

TO: The Wager and the Bear is the fifth novel in what feels like an eclectic oeuvre of novels that began with The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, although you had written speculative fiction short stories before that.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing journey and do you feel your writing has shifted in style and focus over the 20 years or so since you sat down to type the first line of Maximilian?

JI: Everyone’s writing changes with time. I started writing fiction when I was a teenager and  I never really stopped. I didn’t write to get published. I didn’t even write to get read. I never sent a manuscript to anyone. No one ever saw my stories apart from me, and everything I ever wrote up to the age of about forty has been long lost or discarded. For me it was either a hobby or a habit. I wrote a non-fiction book, The Good Zoo Guide) and I self-published one novel but I didn’t tell many people about it.

So when I wrote Maximilian Ponder it was no different. I never expected this story to see the light of day. It took me about five years to write and I sat on the manuscript for another five years before one day I showed it to my son, and he persuaded me to send it to an agent. When I look back on it, I can see how I lacked discipline then as a writer. My prose was lazy and unpolished. The timelines were tortuous. The voice was raw. The narrative was hazy. I had no sense of how to edit my own writing. But you learn writing by writing. It’s like any other craft. I’m still proud of Maximilian. I hope I always will be.

TO: One feature of The Wager and the Bear that I particularly enjoyed was the shift in narrative registers, from omniscient avuncular narration in the bar scene, to something more close third person when we get to moments of high physical drama on the ice or in the harbour.

Is that variation something you were aware of and striving for in an architect/plot-driven approach to storytelling, or is it more of an organic product of a gardener/character-led approach to writing.

JI: I’m interested that you picked up on this. I haven’t heard this observation from anyone else and I thought perhaps I had got away with it. It had always been my intention to have a rather chummy narrator, like someone you meet in a village who stops you to tell you the story. But curiously that voice didn’t work so well when it came to scenes of close intimacy or drama so I quietly let it dissolve away into a more traditional third person narrative. By then, I hoped, the reader should be sufficiently engaged in the story not to notice. The voice doesn’t disappear altogether though, and it comes back when it is needed. When I read the manuscript through I decided not to change it. I rather liked it.

TO: Tom Horsmith is a passionate progressive-minded articulate student with a science education, while Montague Causley stands indicted on the other side of the political divide.

“For there was one offence, in many of their eyes, of which Montague Causley was impeachably guilty. He was a Tory. That was his crime.”

You too have a background in science with a PhD in the ecology of freshwater leeches, and your impassioned 2020 blogpost about the evils of Brexit and the politics of labelling and division seem even more relevant today.

So, how much of Tom Horsmith is actually John Ironmonger?

JI: Ha ha – I suppose Tom is entirely me – both as a young man and an older one … eternally frustrated by the ignorance of the political establishment about issues that really will impact the lives of everyone. And yes, wholly opposed to anything (like Brexit) that sets out to divide people rather than unite us. Like Tom I don’t stake a claim to any political affiliation. You might remember the line when Monty questions Tom about this. Tom’s reply:

‘I would say my attitude towards political parties is much the same as my attitude towards tattoos,’ he said, and he offered Causley a smile. ‘I fully approve of them in principle. But I have yet to see one I like enough for me.’

TO: It is in the nature of climate change fiction to try to deliver useful(utile) information alongside the sweetness(dulce) of an entertaining story, and although I’ve read a lot of cli-fi, The Wager and the Bear did give me some fascinating insights I’d not heard about before around the creation of our fossil fuel reserves which really helped emphasise for me why we shouldn’t be burning the bloody stuff.

So can you tell us about the microbe that took 60 million years to evolve and why that means the carbon locked in coal in the ground is far too dangerous to be released?

JI: This is such a fascinating story, I can’t understand why we don’t teach it in primary schools or build temples to the bug that saved the world.

There is a colossal mystery that lies behind our beautiful, temperate planet, and it is a mystery that has been the key to our survival. Simply put, for sixty million years nothing could figure out how to eat wood. That may seem like a trivial mystery, but evolution is usually a lot more inventive and powerful than that. It only took sixty million years between the first mammals and the first humans. And yet, for sixty million years, nothing could find a way to digest cellulose.

Odd.

This meant that trees couldn’t rot. There were trillions and trillions of huge trees on the planet but when they died they just fell over and stayed there. Nothing would rot them. No bugs, no fungi, no termites, no beetles. Nothing. The trees just wouldn’t disappear. Forests became huge mountains of dead trees. Imagine if plants were to discover how to make plastic – the same thing would happen again. Wood turned out to be the plastic of its time – a material that would never go away. And it wasn’t the only by-product of living systems that wouldn’t rot. Tiny diatom plants were leaving behind droplets of oil when they died, and nothing could eat this stuff either.

The planet became covered in mountains of dead trees and colossal lakes of oil. But curiously for us, this turned out to be a very good thing. Three hundred and sixty million years ago, when plants invented wood, the world was fifteen degrees hotter than it is today. Humans couldn’t have survived then. The heat would have killed us. And there was no ice anywhere, not even at the poles. The oceans were seventy or eighty metres higher than they are today, and all of this was because there was eight times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide warms things up.

But all these monumental piles of undigested wood that covered the planet were doing us a very big favour. They were taking carbon out of the air. So were the oil producing plants. As they did, the world began to cool down.

For sixty million years the planet slowly cooled. Ice formed at the poles and sea levels fell. The ice acted as a planetary air conditioning system and eventually we got the perfect climate. Then, hey presto! A bug figured out how to eat wood just in time to save the world from freezing, and now there are lots of creatures that will do that job. But, thankfully, most of those massive mountains of carbon and lakes of oil had long been buried, so we were safe. The world we inherited would stay pristine and comfortable forever. So long as no one started to burn all that coal and oil.  And we wouldn’t be that stupid, would we?

TO: Your books have been translated into thirteen languages but it was still somewhat surprisingly to my mind that The Wager and the Bear was first published in German. Another of your books Das Jahr des Dugong is still just released in German.  You have also published articles in Italian newspapers. The versatility that comes with bilingualism enabled Emmi Itaranta to write Memory of Water simultaneously in English and Finnish, although Jorge Luis Borges spoke eloquently about the advantages of writing in English rather than his native Spanish.

Where did your polyglot-ism come from? Does it enable you to translate your own works, and how have those multiple languages influenced your writing and the reach of your work?

JI: Aha. You have been misinformed. I am absolutely not a polyglot – and in fact the only language I could ever comfortably get around with (apart from English) was Swahili. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I have been lucky to have my books translated into several languages, but the hard work of translation was always done by someone else. My books are popular in Germany and due to quirks in the publishing process they do often appear there first. Occasionally readers of the foreign language editions will ask me, ‘what do you think of the translation?’ and I have to reply, ‘how would I know?’ I have to trust the translator. Which is probably always good advice.

TO: Oops – my bad. Sorry about that misapprehension which was entirely my own assumption. Though Swahili to English is still an impressive linguistic range.

I liked your blogpost reference to one of my favourite Simon & Garfunkel songs which deals with friends growing older, though I still have a few years to go before it’s my time to “sit on a park bench quietly.”  It did get me thinking about the ages at which writers make their break throughs. My daughter went to school with YA author Alice Oseman, who secured her first publishing deal before she’d even taken her A’levels (not that I’m jealous or anything). You, however, waited to begin writing your first published novel until you were in your fifties.

Would you have liked to have started sooner, or do the advantages of experience outweigh any regrets?

JI: I am in awe of young writers who take this step in their twenties (or even younger).  When I think back on the writing of my younger self I only feel relief that none of it ever saw the light of day. So no, I have no regrets about starting late.

TO: There is a quote of Ursula K Le Guin’s that I am particularly fond of and which seems even more relevant in our current troubled times. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

That quote came back to me when reading a rather meta moment in The Wager and the Bear. One of the characters, in approaching a critical decision, makes the observation that “History is about stories. More than anything – that’s what it is. It has very little to do with the order of kings, or dates, or treaties. It’s about stories. Stories we can tell. Stories we remember. Stories with a message.”

What stories have delivered messages that changed you? And what message  do you hope readers of The Wager and the Bear might pick up and be changed by?

 JI: Ursula Le Guin is right of course. Nothing about our world is fixed or immutable. Our systems of government, our institutions, our laws – all can be changed – often on the whim of a single man (and it usually is a man.) So, I think the illusion of permanence we have is just that – an illusion. My family held a party in 1992 to celebrate the entry of Britain into Europe. I never thought I would one day see those freedoms taken away. We all watch open-mouthed as an unhinged narcissist dismantles some of the most cherished ideals and constitutional traditions in the USA. We have seen it happen in Russia, and elsewhere too. The only thing we can be sure of is that the world in one hundred years will not resemble the world today – not the politics, nor the technology, nor the climate.

So I have a fondness for stories that make us confront this inevitable change. If we can’t imagine a change we can’t try to prevent it. Assuming we want to. ‘Brave New World,’ and ‘1984.’ ‘Farenheit 451,’ ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ They are dystopias, but they carry a warning. Among my favourite novels is ‘Address Unknown’ by Katherine Kressman Taylor; written in 1934 it offers a stark warning of what might (and eventually did) happen in Germany. The Wager and the Bear is not a dystopia, but I hope some readers will take the warnings seriously. The damage we are doing to our climate is irreversible. We could perhaps mitigate some of the impact. We could find ways to slow it down. But we won’t re-freeze the ice caps or mountain glaciers – not for a million years.  Some sea-level rise is now baked in – whatever we do. We may lose every beach you ever saw. We probably will. We may lose Venice and Kolkatta and Jakarta and Shanghai and London and Florida. We probably will. We need to start taking this seriously and not treating it as the noises from a lunatic fringe.

TO: Dan Bloom claims to have coined the term Cli-fi for climate change fiction in 2011, although Arthur Herzog was already addressing the theme in the rather prescient book Heat back in 1978.

What works of cli-fi have inspired you? Which ones would you recommend to a general reader?

JI: Heat is an extraordinary novel. It tells the story of an engineer who realises that rising CO2 levels will eventually make the world uninhabitable – and despite extreme weather events and droughts, no one pays any attention. Until it’s too late. Does that remind you of anything?

I would suggest J.G Ballard’s ‘Drowned World,’ John Lanchester’s ‘The Wall,’ and I have great hopes for, ‘The Water that May Come’ by Amy Lilwall – which I haven’t yet read because it won’t be published until October – but I’ve heard great things about it.

And I would urge on readers a non-fiction book – ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming’ by David Wallace Wells which is a very stark and urgent exploration of climate change and its devastating consequences.

TO: Climate change fiction, like the world it is trying to describe and maybe change, faces many challenges.  Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson warn against writing dysptopian stories that are a kind of ‘pornography of despair’. Researchers like Matthew Schneider-Mayerson argue that we need narratives of hope that inspire action, rather than merely raising awareness. Oreskes and Conway in Merchants of Doubt identified how corporations have constantly sought to manage messages to delay action. The real battle we face is arguably not one of science, or technology, but against well-funded campaigns of toxic misinformation and political leverage, particularly with a climate denier as US president (among his many other grievous faults).

Which direction do you think cli-fi works need to take now, by way of message or audience? Do you have any works in the pipeline on this theme?

JI: I am coming to the view that climate fiction should not really be seen as a genre – like sci-fi, fantasy, or crime. Instead I hope that writers of contemporary stories will weave the climate into their tales. It doesn’t need to be the driver of the story. But we ought at least to acknowledge the backdrop – especially for fiction that extends us any way into the future. If we ignore what is happening to our planet, our fiction will be redundant in just a few decades. We don’t necessarily need heroes who will fix the planet. We don’t need an apocalypse. But we do need situations that recognise the social disruption and change that is coming our way.

I do have a new book in the pipeline that is pencilled in for publication in 2026 in the UK and also in Germany. The working title (at the moment) is Girl/Ape. I can’t tell you too much about it other than saying it deals with illegal trophy hunting. And a troop or chimpanzees. And a girl from St Piran. Climate is not the central theme, but human impact on the wild world is. So now you know.

TO: And finally, to make it a round dozen of questions

Are there any questions you would have liked me to ask which I didn’t, and if so, how would you have answered them?

JI: Ha ha – I am very happy with the eleven questions you’ve asked. Let’s go with them. And the very best of luck to you and to the Fantasy Hive platform.

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