The Sheep Look Up | Thornfield Hall

One of these days crying may be forbidden. Good girls don’t cry. Survival will depend on the politics of water.

I used to cry a lot when I was very young. Red, swollen eyes the next day. Calling in sick, because who can go to work looking like that? But I’m in a different phase now. Menopause was a gift: I rarely cry anymore. Was it all hormones?

But I wept a bit after beginning Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, the first of a trilogy. In the postapocalyptic future, the narrator, Snowman, recalls that they used to have fall.

That broke me up. I’ve been thinking a lot about fall. Will there be a real autumn this year?

Fall comes later and later. The leaves didn’t change till November last year.

“It’s not effing Vermont, but I expect something,” I commented.

The world’s on fire. It’s hot: 95 degrees. No smoke from the wildfires this week, but it might be back.

“If you’d read science fiction, you wouldn’t be surprised, ” I said to a friend. To tell you the truth, I am surprised, though. But many SF writers, especially those of the ’60s and ’70s, were able to make sense of what makes no sense. They were imaginative, but they also seemed to have special knowledge. They put together politics with technology and climate change.

And so I’ve been thinking about favorite dystpian novels. I highly recommend Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune (1965), set on a desert planet. Herbert focuses on the politics of water. The rich colonists enjoy the luxury of abundance of water, but the Fremen, the natives, must wear special “stillsuits” that recycle their bodily fluids. Paul, the son of a Duke who is assassinated by invaders, joins the Fremen, learns how to survive in the desert, and helps them fight. There is also an ecologist who has plans to “green” the planet by scientifically growing certain plants.

My favorite SF novel, and one of my favorite novels, is The Sheep Look up (1972), by John Brunner. I also recommend this to fans of literary fiction. This postmodern classic focuses on the politics of water, the toxicity of the contaminated food chain, and the rise of illness and epidemics. Lakes, rivers, and seas are contaminated, there are Don’t Drink the Water Days, fines for not washing your hands, and a water shortage in Denver, where the the water level of lakes and rivers has dwindled. (That is happening now in Colorado.) Brunner’s style is brilliant and the structure of the novel is experimental. He’s living in the world of John Barth and Frank Herbert.

I always go back to Doris Lessing’s beautifully-written novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), set in London in a near future, or perhaps a parallel present. Society is breaking down, but the newspapers publish little information. People chat in public and share what they know about where to buy potatoes and other necessities. No one has a clue what kind of disaster has happened, but people are leaving the city.

Parts of this are surreal. Sometimes the narrator senses a life beyond the walls of her flat. And then one day a man enters the flat and tells her she must take care of a young girl, Emily, who is brittle, anxious, and too vivaciou. Yet she knows more about this new world than the narrator. Gangs of dangerous young people camp in the streets before going north. All the residents in the neighborhood are terrified. .The narrator knows she and Emily must leave the city, but where should they go? No one ever comes back. Emily becomes involved with one of the leaders of the young people, and gradually switches roles with fthe narrator. She is now the adult with access to information and supplies. There is a happy, surreal ending. There’s no way out without the surreal.

Paradoxically, dystopian novels can cheer us up. It’s because these brilliant writers see a complexity of politics and ecology that we could not unravel on our own. Not that I can unravel it! But without these books I’d be terrified and in dystopian denial.

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoin with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spreads. –Milton, “Lycidas”

In his brilliant, shocking novel, The Sheep Look Up, published in 1972, John Brunner imagined Earth’s toxic future. The planet is in bad shape. Very bad shape.

Not only are lakes, rivers, and seas contaminated in Brunner’s classic novel, but there are Don’t Drink the Water Days, fines for not washing your hands, and a water shortage in Denver, where the the water level of lakes and rivers has dwindled. (That is happening now in Denver.) In California,where the air is the most toxic (especially in L.A.), people wear oxygen masks to breathe.

Living conditions are far from satisfactory. Lice, cockroaches, rats, and vermin have become immune to all pesticides, even to banned poisons like DDT (which, in The Sheep Look Up, is still illicitly manufactured). And the antibiotics in chicken and other food are making humans immune to antibiotics. (Sound familiar?)

There is yet another twist with the toxic food chain: Puritan, the costly organic grocery store where people pay inflated prices out of terror, is selling much of the same food one buys at the traditional supermarket.

At the center of the novel is a radical movement, the Trainites, founded by Austin Train, who got disgusted with the direction of his followers – “I am not a Trainite,” he tells a friend – and disappeared to live under the name Fred Smith and earn a living as a garbage man.

No worries: there are countless imposters who say they are Austin Train and fuel the Trainites’ voracity for action. But Train himself is a gentle genius, the author of “The Great Epidemics” (1965), “The Resistance Movement in Nature” (1972), “Preservatives and and Additives in the American Diet” (1971), “You Are What You Have to Eat” (1971), “Guide to the Survival of Mankind” (1973), and “A Handbook for 3000 A.D.” He wanted to spread awareness without pointless riots. Think of him as the scientific American Gandhi.

Peg, a radical journalist, sets out to find Austin after their friend, Decimus, another leader in the movement, dies, apparently crazy and on drugs. The media go viral with this story of the fallen hero. Peg is convinced that Decimus, who was not a drug user, was deliberately given drugs in his food or drink to destroy his reputation. Her editor doesn’t like her take on the story.

She muses,

It must have been done to discredit Decimus. Must have. These stereotyped interchangeable plastic people with dollar signs in their eyes couldn’t bear to share their half-ruined planet with anyone who climbed our of his ordained grooves. A black JD dropout was meant to die in a street brawl, or better yet in jail partway through a spell of ninety-nine. For him to be loved and looked up to like a doctor or a priest, by white as well as black – that turned their stomachs!

The Americans in Brunner’s novel are constantly ill. Endless colds, diarrhea, flu, cholera, rashes, nearly incurable gonorrhea, and violent hallucinations ravage the population. In small country in Africa and in the Honduras, a foodstuff manufactured by a rich philanthropist in Colorado is laced with a hallucinatory drug that makes both countries go crazy and kill one other. Was it genocide? Was it a plot to keep third-world countries from establishing a stable government? The philanthropist says no. He says it was not drugged.

And then a huge mob of young people demonstrate in front of the factory to procure batches of the foodstuff. They say they want to be crazy.

An Irish major on a U.N. mission tells them:

“But you can’t want to go insane! You can’t want a-a bum trip that goes on for life?”

“Can’t I, baby? Are you ever wrong!” Fritz, his voice cold, dead serious, dead. “Listen, Mike, because you don’t understand and you ought to. Who’s going to be sane in this country when you know every breath you draw, every glass you fill with water, every swim you take in the river, every meal you eat is killing you? And you know why, and you know who’s doing it, and you can’t get back at the mothers.

Brunner has sketched a huge cast of vivid characters, and made most of them sympathetic. Bewildered families struggle to get by in Colorado, one man working in life insurance, a company about to go out of business because the death rate is so high, and then working with friends to run an air filter company whose air filters prove to be faulty, easily clogged with bacteria.

Many people become toxically, horrifyingly crazy.

The thing is: John Brunner was not crazy. And this novel reminds us of the long-ignored writers and advocates of environmentalism. The Sheep Look Up is a historically important novel. An environmental classic.