‘I need readers to trust that this can happen’: relational realism in Catherine Bush’s and Doreen Vanderstoop’s climate crisis novels

Abstract

This article demonstrates how, challenged by Amitav Ghosh’s claim that realist fiction is ill-suited to deal with the climate crisis, and inspired by Indigenous relational thinking, Catherine Bush and Doreen Vanderstoop turn to ‘relational realism’ in their recent novels. I argue that they use realist narrative strategies creatively to represent climate catastrophes as a symptom of the carbon economy. But rather than portraying a world that is radically different, Blaze Island and Watershed are concerned with everyday reality, are set in clearly identifiable Canadian geographies, and focus on the eco-anxieties of ordinary characters. In addition to discussing intergenerational climate justice and emphasising the need for Indigenous leadership in combating global warming, the two novels enter into conversation with Shakespeare’s The Tempest and early twentieth-century prairie realist novels respectively to tease out their ecological undercurrents and implications. In so doing, they foreground the interplay of realist narrative strategies and relational thinking to emphasise the creative potential of the novel in addressing climate change and the need for communities to come together to save the planet.