It doesn’t have to this way
Alistair Mackay
Kwela Publishers
ISBN: 9780795710322
Janet van Eeden: Alistair Mackay has written one helluva novel. The first pages throw the reader headlong into a dystopian nightmare of a place which used to be Cape Town. The blistering heat, the eternal breath-stealing wind, the flies, the struggle to find any relief from the elements – the reader knows immediately that this is not going to be a light read.
Mackay alleviates the darkness of his opening chapter by taking the reader back 15 years before global warming brought the apocalypse. He tells the narrative through the eyes of Luthando, Viwe and Malcolm, each of whose stories take us deeper into the pre-apocalyptic world of the story. Luthando and Viwe meet at a reforestation festival, a festival designed to do exactly what it says. They are planting trees to try to arrest greenhouse gases that are potentially destroying the atmosphere. They connect through Malcolm, a friend to one and acquaintance to the other. Luthando believes the hippie nonsense of the festival is too over-the-top, and Viwe is deeply committed to it, although he fights his own demons of a traditional Christian/African upbringing, which contrasts with how he wishes to live his life true to himself. Malcolm is there to see how to incorporate aspects of the event into an app he’s creating, an augmented reality app which will be implanted directly into the cornea of the user.
The novel unfolds in a surprising way with the development of the characters, especially Luthando and Viwe, becoming profound and touching. Malcolm takes a more neutral path in his approach to life, focusing on his software development job. In the end, though, he too has to make a life-defining choice. Each character is distinctly drawn and compelling, and the choices Luthando, Viwe and eventually Malcolm make are satisfying and fulfil the story’s promise.
The novel deals with a multitude of far-reaching issues, such as an anonymous minority controlling the masses from the “Citadel”, microchip implants which rewrite the psyche and memories of the population, as well as the horrors to come if warnings about global warming are ignored. However, there is a tenderness to the human relationships between the three main characters. Luthando surprises everyone, especially himself, when he becomes a “greenie”, an activist for the sake of global warming. Viwe has to excoriate the depths of his own beliefs, as his Christian mother damns his homosexual tendencies, and he has to find his truth for himself in spite of evidence of the predictions of the Book of Revelation coming true around him. Malcolm is perhaps the most surprising character, as he is in the luxurious position of being part of the Citadel’s elite through his work, until he, too, has to make an almost impossible choice. A subplot introduces Milo, a boy in the present, who has to live with the consequences of those who came before him. His character is beautifully articulated, and it is his story arc that contains the seeds of hope.
This fierce novel demands that the reader pays attention throughout. The issues are real, very possible and ultimately terrifying. There are moments which remind me of George Orwell’s classic, 1984. I hope It doesn’t have to be this way isn’t as prescient. It is a powerful debut work from Alistair Mackay. I look forward to more work from this intriguing author.
Some memorable quotes:
On queerness:
You know, gays are probably the best thing to ever happen to this planet. We reduce overpopulation. We save the world from the toxic masculinity that got us into this mess – domination and conquest, instead of nurturing, feminine qualities. We’re nature’s attempt to self-correct. (156)
On religion:
It must be such a comfort … to believe that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, everything will be okay in the end. (140)
On Antifa:
They talk … about the vigilante killings of climate change deniers that have been taking place across the world. (141)
On the world of augmented cognitive function:
When he removes the implant, the man becomes woozy …. After a few hours, the man’s eyes turn opaque. He enters a state of low-grade seizure, that lasts more than a week, but he survives. And so the Shepherds are the first to learn the symptoms of Disconnection Sickness. (158)
“We can live eternally as data in a cloud,” he said. But he was wrong about us. We are flesh and blood and consciousness, mixed. You can’t separate the data from the hardware any more than you can extract the grain from the wood. We are animals. Small and frightened. Malcolm thought our bodies were prisons, but they aren’t prisons. They are life rafts. And they are so easy to sink. (162)
If you’re not paying for it, you are the product. (235)
On the world of rewriting reality:
“We have a partner for Unsuffering. They are willing to pay us for every user that downloads it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Malcolm says, “they’re paying for us to make people forget the terrible things that happened to them? So if a family has its house bombed by Citadel security forces and they lose their child, say, then the app will be used to make sure they don’t resent it?” (236)
Below, Alistair answers Janet van Eeden’s questions on his debut novel:
- Firstly, Alistair, you have written one helluva novel. I’m a little gobsmacked after reading it, as you cover so many issues which often have the hollow ring of truth to them. Dare I ask the inevitable question, how on earth did you come up with such a far-reaching scenario?
Thank you! I’m not sure that I’ve figured out yet where ideas come from. I remember taking a course on “green political thought” during my undergraduate degree, where I was first exposed to some of the most alarming climate studies and projections. Our indifference to the climate crisis has been weighing on me ever since then. I have an anxiety disorder and it’s been getting worse for years, for both personal and global reasons, and so the connection between the mental health crisis and the climate crisis started to feel obvious to me. And I suppose as a queer kid growing up in a homophobic world, I felt despised and excluded for many of my teenage years, and I think that alienation made it easier to see marginalisation as it happens to others. It also maybe helped me to question everything, and to imagine living a different kind of life. My mom has always joked that I was a trade unionist as soon as I could talk – I had to fight for my rights as the youngest of my siblings! Maybe that explains why I was always so aware of how dysfunctional late-stage capitalism is? The scenario of this book was in my subconscious. The challenge was writing a story of love, hope and resilience within it.
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The scenario of this book was in my subconscious. The challenge was writing a story of love, hope and resilience within it.
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- Do you feel like your novel might be prophetic in some ways? What aspects of it feel more than possible to you right now?
Absolutely. It was really unsettling when the Durban floods happened earlier this year, because the book had just been released then, and there are floods just like those in Durban in the story. Likewise, the unbearable heat in Cape Town in the story was met with an earlier-than-expected record heatwave in Europe over their summer. I think the world of this novel is the one we are racing towards if we don’t change course – not just the climate, but the tech stuff, as well. Already, the technology for deepfake videos exists. Elon Musk is already working on a microchip for the brain.
- You have written a novel which has a very personal and intimate relationship at its core. The macro story is seen through the eyes of the microcosm of a love affair between two men. Which came first? The relationship or the larger story?
The larger story was there first, but it didn’t work until the relationship came alive. I’ve said before that this book took me many rewrites to get right, and I think with each rewrite I got closer to the characters, and viewed the world through a more intimate lens. I wanted readers to fall in love with the characters and their story, and to do that I had to fall in love with them first, and give them very personal, intimate parts of myself.
- The novel was written as part of an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Did you attend in person or were the seminars, and so on, conducted online? How did you find the experience of doing a virtual degree (as I assume it was)?
I absolutely loved my MFA. I know there is a lot of controversy as to whether they are worth it or not, but I found the experience hugely enriching. It was pre-pandemic (I graduated and moved home just in time for that), so it wasn’t virtual. I was in New York and was exposed to brilliant writers all the time – via our seminars and lectures and workshops, but also just at book readings and literary events across the city. The backbone of the MFA is workshop, where you produce a chapter or short story every 2-3 weeks and critique one another’s work. I’ve found that so useful that I have continued with a writing group ever since – but this one is virtual, because none of us are in the same city anymore!
- What single aspect of daily life would you change if you were able to wave a magic wand, so that things don’t work out the way they do in your novel?
Compassion. It’s a bit of a Noordhoek-hippie answer, but I think if we were more compassionate towards ourselves and others, it would radically alter our trajectory. If we didn’t turn away from the suffering around us, and saw the humanity in each other; if we didn’t berate ourselves and hate ourselves and not feel good enough, we wouldn’t try to fill the void with material things and distractions the way we do.
- The title of your book is fairly hopeful. I’m pleased about that. I’d hoped for a bit more of a happy ending to it, and there is a tiny glimmer of hope in Malcolm’s journey at the end. Are you at all hopeful about humanity’s future?
I think things will get as bad as we allow them to get. It’s too late to stop climate change, but it’s not too late to avert the worst-case scenarios. Similarly, often societies swing to the right when people feel unsettled or scared – which is another phenomenon I explore in the book – but they don’t have to. We have the choice of how to respond to droughts and famines: turn on each other, or support each other and try to find a way out of the mess.
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I think things will get as bad as we allow them to get. It’s too late to stop climate change, but it’s not too late to avert the worst-case scenarios. Similarly, often societies swing to the right when people feel unsettled or scared – which is another phenomenon I explore in the book – but they don’t have to. We have the choice of how to respond to droughts and famines: turn on each other, or support each other and try to find a way out of the mess.
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I’m not sure how to answer this question, because I still don’t believe that climate change is treated with the urgency it requires, and far too many people are blissfully or wilfully unaware of what’s happening, but there are also inspiring ground-up movements starting across the planet. I don’t think we’ve reached a critical mass of activism yet, but I’m hopeful it’s coming. Writing is an optimistic act, because it assumes we can still change the path we’re on.
- You have an apparent knowledge of IT and the effect of the metaverse, as envisaged by Zuckerman and others, on daily life. It comes through in the possible scenarios facing humanity, which aren’t very far-fetched. My favourite app you refer to is the “Unsuffering”, which smacks of George Orwell’s 1984 and the memory holes used by the Ministry of Truth in that novel. Was that novel an inspiration in any way? (No problem if it isn’t. It’s just a favourite novel of mine.)
I wasn’t aware of the influence of 1984, but I’m sure it’s there! I loved that book. It left me feeling ill for weeks. But it’s been many years since I last read it, so I don’t think it was top of mind – more of a subconscious influence. I can also see the influence of Margaret Atwood, whose work I have always loved, and I think K Sello Duiker.
- Do you have a background in IT? I wondered how you have developed an interest in AR and AI and the other issues you bring up as possibilities in your novel.
Definitely no IT background. I think I just have very broad interests – and a weakness for falling into internet rabbit holes. I can lose hours reading up about random topics before I catch myself. Also, my background is in branding and marketing, and I used to compile trend reports for clients for many years, and there are some amazing resources for digital/AI/AR trends out there which I would have to read for work.
- Here is the standard and dreaded question you’re probably asked in every single interview: what issues inspire you (apart from climate change, as seen in this novel) and what are you thinking about writing next?
I think I’m drawn to writing about damaged characters, and love across social divides, and reclaiming our sense of humanity. The novel I’m currently working on is a story about breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma, and it’s also set in Cape Town and also grapples with many of South Africa’s social problems – but this one isn’t speculative fiction.