I left school for good at lunchtime on the day I turned eighteen. I walked home. The house was empty. I had no plans, either for the afternoon or for the time beyond it—my life, which stretched empty ahead. Or didn’t. It was becoming clear to everyone now that things were getting worse. The winter before, half of Gloucestershire had been flooded, and the waters, refusing to recede, had made a new fen, covering homes and fields, roads, schools, what had been hills rising now as islands. In York, the river had burst its banks and the city center was gone, walls that had stood for nearly two millennia washed halfway down to Hull. People didn’t say these places were gone. They didn’t say that there were families living in caravans in service stations all along the M5, lined up in the parking lots with volunteers running aid stations out of the garage forecourts. People said, Greengrass said she wanted to explore the “disconnect” between our knowledge of the impending disaster of the climate crisis, and our inability to act on it – “that kind of weird space where you can watch something happening that’s terrible, and know that it’s happening, and be afraid of it happening, but still just get on with all of the ordinary things of life”.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Waterstones

The story is quiet, and the pacing is measured, matching the lives of those in High House, and making the devastation and losses outside this tiny place of safety all the more horrifying. One of the many any quotes I highlighted in that book (my copy was a forest of post in notes) was one from the narrator’s grandmother:They were silent for a long time then, and I stood very still in the corridor and thought of Pauly, the way his body twitched in his sleep, the tense look he got when Francesca was there, and how it was not hard at all for me to tell if he was happy or not. Every week there is news about how the world is changing. The polar ice melting, flooding, wildfires, extreme weather. We have been warned for so many years about the future of the earth, and we still think it is in the future. But it is here. Nun wird erzählt, wie dieses Quartett lebt, wie die Menschen im Dorf nach und nach verschwinden, die Sommertouristen nicht mehr kommen, wie sie sich selbst versorgen, mit allen Problemen, wie der Kälte im Winter, der anstrengenden Nahrungsmittelproduktion und dem sorgsamen Umgang mit den Vorräten, die nicht mehr erzeugt werden können. Die Katastrophe bricht nicht mit einem Paukenschlag ins Leben der Protagonisten ein, sondern es passiert ein ganz langsames Fade-Out. Es scheint fast so, als wäre diese Wohngemeinschaft wieder bei der Gesellschaft der ersten Menschen in Europa angekommen, selbstverständlich mit ein paar Luxusvorräten, wie Antibiotika und Morphium ausgestattet. To engage further with this topic, consider reading other recent works of climate fiction, like Weather by Jenny Offill and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, or nonfiction, like The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells or Move by Parag Khanna.

The High House imagines England after a Jessie Greengrass’s The High House imagines England after a

so I do as he tells me and lace up my running shoes, which we have mended and mended because there are no more pairs left in the barn, and I run out of the high house, out of the orchard and away from the tide pool, away from the things that need doing, away from Pauly and his sideways concern, and away from Sally and her worries about what we will eat and how much wood we have stored for the winter, out into the empty countryside, which is quiet and has no interest in me. It is good to be alone when I am running, and afterward there is a period when I feel better. Pauly waits for me at the high house, and I see his own relief when he sees mine. It is I who need him now. I need his solidity and his certainty. I need his aptitude for making do. But sometimes in the night, when I lie on his floor and count my breaths to try to make sleep come, I feel him watching me, and I think that perhaps I have always needed him, even when he was small—even when it looked like it was the other way around, because he gives me shape and substance, and to be needed is to be held in place.Climate scientist Francesca anticipated the increased erratic weather patterns, melting glaciers, and severe flooding that would cause worldwide disasters. "The High House" takes us to a home on a high hill in Suffolk surrounded by gardens, a barn full of supplies, and a small mill and generator powered by water. Francesca set up this home for her toddler son and her teenage stepdaughter. She also arranged to have an old caretaker/handyman and his granddaughter move in as caretakers of the home. The last message from Francesca and her husband directed the two children to travel to the High House to shelter safely. So are you saying, the man pressed her, That we are now looking at a future in which we no longer have fair warning of extreme weather events? Perched on a sloping hill, set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden, and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. Caro, Pauly, Sally, and Grandy are safe, so far, from the rising water that threatens to destroy the town and that has, perhaps, already destroyed everything else. But for how long? but it was nearly midnight before at last he fell asleep, exhausted, half in and half out of the doorway. I watched him until I was sure he wouldn’t wake, and then I carried him to bed. I put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, fetched a glass of water, and then, for comfort—his, or mine—I climbed in next to him and, with his small feet pressed against my stomach, I slept too.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS

The High House imagines such a scenario, though it doesn't take much imagination to envision the seas rising. They already are. Though some deny climate change, most of us can see the changes happening all around us. Paulys Eltern waren Journalisten und Umweltaktivisten. Erst Jahre später wird deutlich, wie akribisch seine Mutter Francesca die Zuflucht ihres einzigen Kindes nach einer globalen Umweltkatastrophe geplant hatte. Das High House auf einer Kiesbank in der Flussmündung, fernab von anderen Menschen gelegen, war völlig autark, vorausgesetzt, seine Bewohner hatten gelernt mit Wassermühle, Trinkwasserbrunnen und Kohleherd umzugehen. Der drohende Weltuntergang war schon immer Francescas Thema gewesen. Sie konnte sich darüber aufregen, dass andere Menschen in den Tag hinein lebten, während sie unermüdlich um die Welt reiste, um deren Bewohner in letzter Minute noch aufzurütteln. Als Paulys ältere Halbschwester Caroline die Verantwortung für ihren Bruder übernimmt und mit ihm ins High House flüchtet, beginnt für sie ein neues Leben, als wären die Geschwister außer Sally und ihrem Grandy auf der Landzunge die einzigen Menschen. There are, however, moments of beauty: the weeks of summer heat feeling like “living in a headache”, or the way the protagonists cling to each other like a tangled “knot”. Greengrass is also chillingly articulate when describing our wilful blindness in the face of the initially creeping, then cascading inevitability of disaster: “Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present.” Ultimately, though, The High House doesn't feel like it amounts to anything new. She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures—that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all.The premise is dark, but Greengrass's lyrical prose brings glimmers of light...Despite the devastation, this not-quite family finds small moments of love and happiness." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

The High House by Jessie Greengrass, review: affecting but

The high house sits above the waterline on an unnamed stretch of the English coast, some time in the near future. Below it lies a now-drowned world, carnage of a meteorological event of unprecedented destruction. “Each year, between water and neglect, less and less of the village remains,” reports Sally, the first of three narrators. “Grass grows in tufts from walls. Silt covers gardens. Crabs run across broken cobbles of the road.” I heard Francesca’s hissed intake of breath. I heard her pause, turn, walk away, and I felt a sudden spasm of guilt. How warm Pauly was in my lap, how comfortable, how soft, and how it must have hurt Francesca then to be in the next room, alone, and to have the truth confirmed: it wasn’t that Pauly didn’t talk at all, but only that he didn’t talk to her.As Caro says: “There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? The question with all cli-fi is what the reader should actually do with the warnings it aims to deliver. And this is where The High House stands out, for Greengrass understands that perhaps the best writers and artists can hope for now is to help us admit, accept and process our collective failure to act. From the far side of disaster, Caro recalls people persisting with “the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do.” The High House' quietly destroyed me, because it portrays an oncoming future that I already believe in.