Scarcely a week now goes by without a new fiction on the theme of climate change. Such works have been termed cli-fi, a truly appalling neologism. To write a full survey of the field is outside the scope of a single essay. Rather I want to concentrate on The Sea and Summer and Turner himself, for the two are inextricable: the man grounded his writing in his life, even when depicting the future.
If spoken now, these words might be addressed by a baby boomer to a millenial. In fact they were said to me some thirty years ago. The speaker was the Australian novelist and critic George Turner. He was a small, wiry, olive-skinned man, his eyes merry behind square bifocals. Despite the warning, his tone was light and ironic. There was nothing nasty about the remark, rather a commitment to telling the truth. For some novelists, the stance could seem unbearably pretentious, or self-aggrandising.
For Turner it was neither. He was a kind man in person, and gentlemanly in his manners, although he could also be ferocious, particularly when attacked. When Turner and I had this conversation, the word Anthropocene had not been coined. The majority of politicians were ignorant of climate change, the honourable exceptions being Margaret Thatcher and Barry Jones. Yet Turner, then nearly 70, was in the process of producing a novel on that theme, The Sea and Summer.
It would be celebrated internationally, variously termed the first and greatest novel of what has become a literary sub-genre. However, the book has been largely forgotten in Australia, despite its Melbourne setting.
Attempts to reprint it locally have failed. Turner, who died twenty years ago this month, was a writer of paradox. Initially he wrote realist fiction, after serving in the army during the second world war. He bought a new typewriter with the award money, but found it otherwise not life-changing. In the late s, he received a literary grant for Transit of Cassidy , but it did not find a publisher for some years.
