Reviews

Abstract

Towards the end of Roman Bartosch's EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction, the writer poses a provocative question in a subchapter heading: 'Can Books Save the World? ' (p. 281). His answer is even more provocative: 'No, they cannot'. This is an odd closing admission in a book that champions the role of fiction in our response to the environmental crisis. But the heart of Bartosch's argument lies in this admission. He suggests that books, fictional books in particular, do not offer us immediate solutions to the world's environmental problem. We typically do not turn to them for cutting-edge research about carbon emissions, analysis of the latest computer-generated climate models, or data stemming from field research. Nor should we, he claims. Instead, Bartosch sees fiction playing an essential, imaginative role in today's environmentalism. The literary meaning embedded in fictional texts, he argues, 'does not save the world but helps us envision it with more alert eyes' (p. 285). By losing ourselves in fictional books, we develop an appreciation for new perspectives and experiences that enhances our capacity to imagine what it is like for others -other people and, importantly, other species -to live in the world. For Bartosch, fiction thus helps readers imagine alternative realities and move one step closer to an illusive goal of modern environmentalism: to 'think like a mountain', as Aldo Leopold famously suggests, or know 'what it is like to be a bat', as Thomas Nagel encourages.This experience of alternative realities lies at the heart of what Bartosch labels 'EnvironMentality', or the fostering of new environmental awareness permitted by the reading of fiction. While he acknowledges that reading fiction does 'not allow for us to change completely or become the other', he does claim that reading fiction is essential to contesting or reevaluating conventional conceptions of nature and other species by 'allow[ing] new perspectives and experiences to emerge' (p. 70). He demonstrates the potential of his claim by analysing nine well-known postcolonial novels: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and The Whale Caller, Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello.Bartosch's analysis of these novels is prefaced by a detailed discussion of the current state of environmental literary criticism, or ecocriticism. He sees contemporary ecocriticism as beset by three internal contradictions: what role scientific and factual knowledge should play in the analysis of fictional texts;