A post-climate change world in the not-too-distant future is the claustrophobic setting for the debut novel I Have Waited, And You Have Come by Martine McDonagh.
We see Rachel’s life in North West England fall apart around her as she comes to grips with a possible stalker and environmental changes. I have had the pleasure of reading this book and it is both poignant and terrifying. The world Martine has created here is so vivid and real, it would be hard not to be moved by it.
The Post-Apocalyptic Book Club were lucky enough to manage to talk to Martine about her book:
What was your inspiration for setting this in a Post-Climate change world?
The idea to set the novel in a climate-changed world was the end result of much thought about how the future might look. The conclusion I drew was that life in the mid-to-late 21st Century would probably look more like the historical past than the fictional future as envisaged by Hollywood and I decided to expand on the idea that future developments might undermine our obsession with progress and with every new thing always having to be bigger, faster, cleverer than the thing before.
At the time I wrote I Have Waited, it seemed that climate change would be the most likely perpetrator of future chaos, and I liked the idea of the weather in the novel always having the upper hand, dictating the behaviour of the characters in the story.
As I researched the subject further and explored predictions of rising sea levels, the switching off of the gulf stream, increased intensity and regularity of storms, food shortages, disease, diminishment of fresh water supplies etc., leading to economic collapse, I became interested in the possible impact of these changes on the psychology of the surviving communities and the individuals living in them.
Why did you choose to set this in North West England?
Having lived for ten years in the Manchester area I knew from personal experience that constant cloud cover blocking any glimpse of the sky can have a huge impact on a person’s mood, and this was my starting point. I chose to set the novel in Dunham Massey because it is somewhere I lived for a while and so could imagine it easily and because it provided the perfect location (semi-isolated and prone to flooding!) for the kind of novel I wanted to write. At the time I lived there, the mill was mid-renovation and therefore easily re-imagined as partially derelict.
We clearly see Rachel’s mental state degenerate through the book as she is trying to get to grips with what is happening around her. How difficult was it to write her character and her mindset?
I suppose I should say it was really difficult for a sane person such as myself to get inside the mind of a madwoman, but unfortunately it was remarkably easy. While her mental state degenerates as the novel progresses, I did actually imagine her as mad from the start, but in telling her story in the first person and by casting her as a victim, her madness is veiled until you see her interact with other people and then everything conspires to tip her over the edge.
This may be cheating a little and I couldn’t quite decide – How old is Rachel?
To be completely honest, I don’t remember exactly and all my original notes are in storage. I’m fairly sure she’s in her early forties – let’s say she’s forty-two!
How close do you think we are now to the world that Rachel and Noah live in and how likely is it to happen?
Obviously I have no idea, I wish I did. It was a deliberate choice to show certain elements of contemporary life as being either in the recent past of the novel (cars) or have them disappear during the course of the story (telephones), because I thought that would help to increase the scare factor of the book. Global financial developments in recent years have added another dimension to the likelihood of lifestyle change (if that’s not too Sunday supplement an expression) on a gigantic scale.
Do you think the book fits in with the Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian Genre?
I didn’t set out to write a dystopian novel, but I think it’s turned out that way. I don’t consider it to be post-apocalyptic because I wanted to create the impression that the present of the novel is in the eye of the storm and that the worst is yet to come, although for Rachel it’s probably as bad as it gets. So, I suppose if anything it’s mid-apocalyptic and I’ve created a brand new genre!
What is your favourite Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian Book and why?
Without doubt it’s High Rise by J.G. Ballard. The most frightening dystopias are those that seem only a short hop, skip and a jump away from the way we live now.
I Have Waited, And You Have Come is available to pre-order on amazon and is released on 14th February 2012.
