A LINE YOU HAVE TRACED

Dunnett’s speculative novel traces three Londoners through a slow apocalypse.

In London’s post–WWI Jewish East End, shopkeeper’s wife Bea minds her business. While her best friend, CeeCee, is organizing rent strikes and demonstrating against fascists, she’s more concerned with the unwanted advances of her husband’s pompous friend, Haich, and with the angel who appears to her periodically, bringing with it “a feeling of vague irritation, and a strong flavor of peace.” She records these otherworldly incursions in a thin red notebook, picked up three generations later by her great-granddaughter Kay, a temp worker who stumbles, perpetually hungover, through present-day London’s queer nightlife with her friends El and Cue. Kay sleeps in Cue’s bed and attends El’s experimental drag shows, but she doesn’t tell her compatriots about the time travelers she has imagined visiting her since childhood or her fixation on her great-grandmother’s diary. In a future London laid bare by mass poverty and climate collapse, Ess lives on the “unloved outskirts of the city,” gardening for a newly established branch of the Network, a left-aligned collective that her mother calls a cult. In accordance with the beliefs of the “Basin” that the world is in its “Last Human Chapter,” Ess has been voluntarily sterilized. While organizing the papers of her mother’s friend Mr. J, she comes across Bea’s notebook, passed down from Mr. J’s own great-grandparents and now faded to pink. She receives an invitation from another branch of the Network, who believe that through Ess’ circuitous connection to Kay’s London, they can—and are, in fact, morally obliged to—help her travel backward in time. Dunnett’s languorous prose evokes the beauty and unease of a slow-dying world. Kay sprints to the supermarket under a “blue, hard dusk”; Ess pulls up an unremarkable stone with “a tart, metallic look to it that made her think of the inside of a very rare steak.” These passages often overpower the diaphanous narrators that deliver them. Bea, Ess, and Kay are oddly dissociated from their interpersonal relationships, and as ambassadors of their time periods, they read as all but interchangeable. The meditations that move through them—on reproduction, queer kinship, climate grief, and the permeability of time—are nevertheless profound.

A digressive, lyrical climate novel.