‘The Rain Coming Down in Drenching curtains’: Reading for the Pluvial in the Climate Change Fiction of Chang-Rae Lee and Jane Rawson

Abstract

ABSTRACT Theorisations of climate change literature rethink realism, the status of human/nonhuman relations and the agency of the landscape. This paper uses Sarah Nuttall’s concept of the pluvial mode to examine how these theoretical prescriptions function in contemporary novels to create conditions of refuge in spaces that have become largely uninhabitable for the majority of a population through climate change. In Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) rainstorms instigate conditions hospitable to refuge and immerse the text in a drawn-out connection between that concept and watery images, beings and spaces. The novels locate refuge in the realm of affect or condition, and in so doing, create a disruptive element of possibility in otherwise apocalyptic narratives in which there seems to be no escape from precarity and uncertainty.