Kassandra Montag's "After the Flood": On Climate Change and Visions of the Apocalypse in Fiction

Kassandra Montag | After the Flood | HarperCollins | 2019 | 432 Pages

Kassandra Montag’s novel After the Flood, like many books about the end of the world, opens at the moment of the apocalypse. One of the fascinations of apocalyptic literature is imagining how it would look if everything that we know, and all that we rely upon, fell apart. When I read these kinds of books, I often wonder about that moment of change, between the pre- and the post-apocalyptic. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, for instance, I found myself thinking, while a flu spreads and one of the main characters, holed up in an apartment, watches television channels blink out and street lights go dark, what if it stops now? What if no one else dies in the pandemic? Could things go back to normal at this point, with half the streetlights off and three television channels left? Or now, with all of the channels gone, but cars still driving in the streets? What was the moment at which they could not go back; when did this become the apocalypse?

In After the Flood that moment, when the end becomes inescapable, is when the dam protecting the narrator’s small town in Nebraska from rising sea levels breaks and the town, one of the last remaining dry lands in the country, floods. However, in contrast to most fiction about the apocalypse, this end has been a long time coming. Sea levels have been rising for generations, the narrator, Myra, tells us. She recounts stories of New Orleans as relayed to her from her grandfather, who had heard them from his grandmother, the last member of their family whose life overlapped with the time when the city was above water. The sea has been rising steadily in the intervening years, and most of the world is underwater once the narrator sets off from her flooded town. She has known her whole life that this was a strong possibility, if not inevitable. As she was growing up, she thought of the apple trees in her back yard as “foreign” like they were already “lost things.” Myra’s daughter does not miss the old world, does not wish to see how things were before. Because this apocalypse is ‘slow’ it is validated by history, becomes normal, as it is progressing. This vision of the apocalypse is conscious of, without dwelling on, climate change. While its title echoes Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood and characters in the novel know that climate change is the reason for the flooding, the plot mostly focuses on Myra’s search for her missing first-born, as she journeys across the sea to the settlement where she believes the girl has been taken, bringing her second daughter along through the perils this involves.

Like many post-apocalyptic fictions After the Flood sees the apocalypse as a retreat to the past. Montag describes the rush of people from the underwater coasts as leaving, “possessions abandoned up the mountainside the way they were along the Oregon Trail” and later the inhabitants of one of the settlements Myra visits look, “like peasants from a seventeenth-century Dutch painting.” Life before the flooding was “a miracle.” After it, Myra’s daughter has a childhood like those, “in frontier stories, the children who knew how to milk a cow at six and shoot a rifle at nine.” These are familiar tropes: the survivors of the apocalypse strengthened by what they must do to survive- and contrasted with the comfortable- but weakened- denizens of modernity. It seems to matter, here, that those in the modern cities perish, while many of the survivors come from the central part of the United States, which is backward-looking and parochial, or wholesome and old-fashioned, depending on perspective, in the popular imagination. Myra herself must make difficult choices as a mother, but choices that are themselves tropes. Can she protect both of her children at once? Should she risk one to save the other? The secondary characters are similarly cliched, and somewhat empty. The ally with a dark secret. The faceless enemies. The leader straining under pressure. Station Eleven’s world before, during, and after the pandemic is more compelling. St. John Mandel narrates a litany of all that was lost in the apocalypse, the whole of the list greater than its parts. In this apocalypse, luck plays the largest role in survival, one of the main characters, on leaving a city where the flu, unknown to most of those there, has already arrived, hails an “improbably lucky” taxi, that has not yet picked up anyone infected, to take him to the airport for a business trip. The narrative marks him as safe when his plane makes an emergency landing at a small airport in the Midwest, where he joins with other survivors, building a community in the airport’s abandoned Business Class lounge. It is luck, not cleverness, strength, or even an inherent immunity that saves these characters. St John Mandel’s lens, though the novel has nothing to do with climate change, means that her work functions as an argument for something like the Green New Deal, because it presents a world that seems precious, and worth protecting, while emphasizing both the precarity of our own lives and our ability to improve our world. 

Still, After the Flood is not without social commentary. In one of the settlements Myra visits, she finds a small group of people living in mansions at high elevation, their houses cleaned and their food prepared by slaves. Myra guesses that these are families who were wealthy before the flooding began, who were able to use their money to enrich themselves as the waters rose higher. Rather than equalization, or at least the supremacy of sheer strength, that much apocalyptic literature predicts (grocery stores looted, money worthless) this apocalypse is one in which our own hierarchies remain intact, to some extent. It is not something that Montag spends much time thinking about, but is one of the few sections of the novel that feels real, the way our own world would look if this kind of flooding were to happen.

Here, the flooding is mostly not important in and of itself, but rather merely provides the setting for Myra’s adventures. It makes endless knife fights, and a few very convenient coincidences possible, without coming to the fore itself. The novel may not really be about climate change, but it does reflect, to some degree, the way that we actually think about climate change in the United States. It is a threat (denied or not) firmly in the background, like a wave building far out at sea.