The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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The four try to live together at High House , while the rising water threatens to overtake the village and has already destroyed the rest of the world, with limited supplies, limited safety, and limits to what Grandy can teach them before his health fails him. When I imagine the lives our children and grandchildren will have, I am overwhelmed. Every time I turn the heat up a notch, open a delivered meal to discover Styrofoam and plastic containers, every time I run the washing machine or turn on the oven or take a warm shower, I am aware that these things I have done all my life are luxuries enjoyed by a few, over a short period of time, and have contributed to our impending crisis. Das Ende ist offen und trotzdem tröstlich. Fast scheint es so, als ob Jeff Goldblums Satz aus Jurassic Park: „Die Natur findet immer einen Weg“ auch auf die Menschheit anzuwenden wäre.

The High House” Takes a Surviving the End of the World in “The High House” Takes a

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. The High House could be considered climate fiction. With the group, discuss whether you would also characterize it as postapocalyptic—or is it too realistic for that? The village is just along the coast from a once thriving port town whose demise occurred both in a single event centuries before – a storm which washed away both the spit which protected its natural harbour and permanently moved the river mouth around which it was based – and then over many years as the town was subject to coastal erosion.As scientists we are used to remaining in one place. We tell ourselves that it is our job only to present the evidence—but such neutrality has become a fantasy. The time for it is past. The key features of the period preceding Greengrass's flood are all too familiar: species death on an increasing scale, bizarre weather conditions, dwindling insect populations, and gradually-encroaching environmental blight. For me, and I suspect many other readers, Greengrass's portrayal of her characters’ response to these potentially cataclysmic shift’s equally recognisable. To take one example Caro, Francesca’s stepdaughter, is unable to deal with her fear of what the future might hold so she tries not to think about it: her mental state perpetually suspended between overwhelming anxiety and deflection/denial’s particularly well-realised, although what Greengrass’s aiming for in chronicling this is less clear to me. I’m not sure if Greengrass is offering her readers an elegy in anticipation of certain doom, an oblique stab at some kind of wake-up call or, perhaps, a cathartic means of rehearsing for an inevitably bleak, real-life outcome through fiction. If Greengrass's piece’s intended to arouse some sort of practical reaction I’m not convinced it’ll have any actual impact beyond brief jolts of recognition. My perspective’s not entirely based on Greengrass’s vision, frankly I’m not persuaded that cli-fi's politically significant in any concrete sense. I don't see people reading this, then laying it down and rushing out to join Extinction Rebellion or any of the groups actively working to avert looming, environmental devastation. Bin ich froh, dass ich Jessie Greengrass mit diesem Roman noch eine Chance geben habe, denn er ist meiner Meinung nach grandios. Mit ihrem letzten Buch Was wir voneinander wissen hatte ich enorme Schwierigkeiten, denn der Sprachstil war mir zu überambitioniert und der Plot antiseptisch unverknüpft. Nun hat sich die Autorin jedoch selbst übertroffen, sie schreibt eine sehr ungewöhnliche, innovative Dystopie, in der die Welt untergeht, aber dies wird nicht mit Action und Überlebenskampf bis aufs Messer zelebriert, sondern mit leisen Zwischentönen beschrieben. Soo gut! In The High House, Jessie Greengrass imagines how a few people adapt and survive the floods that overcome their village, isolated in a house on a hill.

The High House - Harvard Review

If there’s no point. We could stay together, for a while at least. Caro is unhappy. Paul too, probably, although I agree it’s harder to tell. Moving…Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable…[A] poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.”

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Visit the Civil War Room where King Charles 1 and Prince Rupert stayed during their brief visit to the town; view the Stuart Bedroom with its magnificent four poster bed; admire the elegant splendour of the Wallpaper Room with its Georgian displays; visit Mr Marson in his Edwardian Shop; and observe the grand comfort of the Victorian Room. The high house isn’t high, really, but only higher than the land around it, so that when it was first built, before the river had been banked and the cuts made to drain the land, when the rain was heavy and the tide was up and the water spread where it wanted, the house would have been an island, almost, with only the westerly part of its land unflooded, a causeway above the waterline joining the house to the heath. And now at times it is almost an island again.