Posted by Paul March-Russell
http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-there-are-wolves-again-by-e-j-swift/
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In 1937, a former doctor turned best-selling novelist published his most famous work. The Citadel, based upon A. J. Cronin’s own experiences of working amongst the South Wales mining communities, assailed the inequities and inequalities of the medical profession and made the case for a public healthcare system. As has often been remarked, the popular and critical success of The Citadel—the most widely read book ever published by Gollancz—resonated with public opinion, paving the way for the National Health Service in 1948.
Like Cronin, E. J. Swift, in her follow-up to the multiple award-shortlisted The Coral Bones (2022), understands the capacity of popular genre fiction to hook its readers with immersive storytelling and sharp characterisation. But whereas The Citadel is an odd mix of social realism, romantic melodrama, and polemic, with striking tonal registers buoyed by the rise, fall, and redemption of its hero, When There Are Wolves Again achieves its effect by the alternation of its central characters, the psychological honesty of their narratives, and its extrapolation over a fifty-year story arc rooted in the COVID-19 pandemic. The familiar settings of 2020, akin to the looming presence of World War One at the start of The Citadel, build a platform upon which Swift’s future history unfolds. Her prospect for a near-future Britain is ultimately optimistic, but it is neither sentimental nor anodyne. In its tone, characterisation, and plausibility, Swift’s novel is grounded in a realism that avoids the moral platitudes and glib sentiments associated with so-called “hopepunk.”
One other aspect of the novel also echoes The Citadel, and that is Swift’s cultural context. Of the many dystopias and apocalypses that featured in British writing of the 1930s, Gollancz published its fair share, including Francis Stuart’s Pigeon Irish (1932), Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Andrew Marvell’s Minimum Man (1938), and R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). In the same year Cronin’s novel appeared alone, Gollancz also published Katherine Burdekin’s fascist dystopia, Swastika Night (Burdekin wrote it under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), as well as the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Although such novels often presented anti-fascist, pre-apocalyptic warnings, they also amplified the gathering threats of war, genocide, dictatorship, and immiseration. Even the more optimistic works of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), portrayed war, disease, and famine as drivers for the future course of history. Although a convincing case has been made for the speculative fiction of the 1930s as a political mode that, as Terry Castle puts it in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), “dismantles the real … in a search for the not-yet-real,” the slew of such texts also contributed to a structure of melancholic feeling best summed up in Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (1939).
Cut to our own time and we have a superabundance of dystopias and apocalypses in fiction (especially YA), film, TV, music, videogames, and graphic novels. Whilst recent analyses such as Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse (2025)—a modern-day equivalent to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (1934-61)—opine that self-extinction is the most likely outcome, cultural commentators such as Horatio Clare in We Came by Sea (2025) observe that radical change can come from a simple switch of political mindset. As Toynbee himself observed in Civilization on Trial (1948): “We are not doomed to make history repeat itself; it is open to us, through our own efforts, to give history … some new and unprecedented turn.” The absurd fallacy of our current cultural production manifests when it projects the melancholic logic of capitalist realism into the future; when it presents that future as an inexorable straight line as if universal history proceeds, in the words of Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics (1966), “from the slingshot to the megaton bomb”—or from a weaponised bone being match-cut with an orbiting thermonuclear device. The fallacy lies in its inherent defeatism, its automatic concession to the neoliberal logic that there is no alternative when, actually, there are alternatives all the time, as Walter Benjamin observed in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1939). It is for this reason, in electing to write against the white noise of voices prophesying doom, that Swift’s turn to the utopian—even the cautiously utopian—is courageous. Indeed, her new novel should by rights achieve the same for the ecological movement as Cronin achieved for universal healthcare. It is, put simply, the most important, the most courageous, the most uplifting novel I have read in years.
It is no coincidence that the writing (or rather, the telling) of history is foregrounded in Swift’s narrative. The novel begins with two women—Hester Moore, a filmmaker, and an unnamed speaker—sitting around a campfire on May Eve (Beltane) in 2070. The speaker warns Hester that “this is going to be a purely organic recollection, with all the whimsy that implies,” but also “an honest account” as far as her “capricious” mind will permit. This, then, will not be a grand récit, moving inexorably in one direction, but will take its fancy, turning unpredictably yet always following the contours of its thought, memory and reflection caught on the wing. Neither woman is a conventional agent of history. The speaker, we learn, is in her mid-fifties, her companion nearly thirty years older. Hester has “always felt safest on the outside, looking in”—her narrative is told, appropriately, in second person—but this description is also true of her interlocutor, whose first name we gather is Lucy, and whose surname (Gillard) is mentioned only once in the novel. What follows is an elliptical, episodic narrative that details Hester’s development as an award-winning documentary filmmaker, from her first independent feature on the dogs of Chornobyl to the creation of the Somerset Marshlands, and Lucy’s progression from the adulation of her Gran, who introduces her to the natural world, to becoming a climate change activist and unexpected (and, in Lucy’s mind, undeserving) hero.
Although Lucy speaks in the first person, she often seems detached from her own story, veering between self-effacement and intense self-consciousness. These modulations may be explained away as symptoms of Lucy’s autism (foreshadowed by her childhood identification with Greta Thunberg), but her condition—sensitively rendered by Swift in the fluctuations of Lucy’s speech—does not explicate either her or Hester’s outsider status. Instead, by virtue of their gender, age, precarity, and ability, neither woman is a traditional custodian of historical narrative. They are the ones who would be narrated, who would exist in the margins or interstices of history. Their names symbolically echo other marginalised literary women: Hester Prynne, ostracised to the outskirts of her community in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Lucy, the idealised ghostly figure in William Wordsworth’s poems. By permitting these characters to not only narrate their stories but also that of their nation (the UK), Swift radically repositions who gets to speak and what version of “our island story” gets to be told. Lucy and Hester write themselves into their parallel histories, often tantalisingly close without quite encountering one another, whilst at the same time reframing how history is presented. Consequently, the thematic content of Swift’s future history is inextricably entangled in its formal presentation—just as the characters are, whether they will it or not, enmeshed in how events unfold and their interrelationship with the natural world.
But, even more than this, by strategically placing her protagonists on the threshold of their society—they share their histories on one of the hinges of the year in the pagan, not Gregorian, calendar—Swift lends them a redemptive function. To evoke Gillian Rose on classical female protagonists in Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), in telling their stories “organically”—that is, in recounting their narratives not with the post facto logic of official histories but with the immediacy of their minds and bodies, emotions and senses—Lucy and Hester redeem what has occurred. They mourn the past, and in so doing unlock a viable future not solely for themselves but for their kin. Instead of the melancholic fixation upon the past, projected into the future as an eternal present, Lucy, Hester, and their associates effect an unprecedented historical turn. It is for this reason that Swift’s novel uplifts the reader, not through some bland folksy optimism, but because she dramatizes how her characters enact positive change in ways that are transformative, believable, and inspirational.
This positivity, though, is weighed by the gravitas that pervades the text, most especially the presence of death. From Lucy’s evacuation during the pandemic to her grandparents’ home, like a wartime refugee, to the coincidence of Hester’s birth date with the Chornobyl explosion, life and death are intertwined in this novel: The sunflowers in Lucy’s grandparents’ garden rise in tandem with the numbers of COVID dead. This intermingling is embodied in the figure of Lux, the wolf dog whom in 2021 Hester smuggles out of the Exclusion Zone that surrounds the former Russian nuclear reactor and back to Britain. Lux’s story is inspired both by the oral testimonies collected in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (2016) and the medical care programme Dogs of Chornobyl, but is also influenced by Sarah Hall’s alternate present in The Wolf Border (2014), in which wolves are reintroduced to England. As Hester says to Lux, they were always and already kin, even before the borderline between civilised land and wilderness was imposed and brought them together on one side of the divide. Hester’s rescuing of Lux is her life’s turning point; from thereon, she “will tell the stories of those who push back against disaster, who look to the light.” But this vocation will not be easy. The description of Hester’s vagrancy in 2027, as she struggles to complete her documentary, Chornobyl Dogs, on borrowed time from public library computers whilst keeping Lux’s presence secret, is one of the most compelling fictional accounts of homelessness I have ever read. As the older Lucy remarks, “Who are we without heartbreak?”
The interconnectedness between life and death—the damage that marks and moulds a person’s life story—is embedded, too, in the novel’s overarching narrative design. As Lucy reflects: “Without the nest box, Gran and I might not have been friends. And without us being friends, there wouldn’t have been the house.” Her grandmother’s home in Herne Hill—which, after the loss of Lucy’s grandfather, becomes a place of refuge for both Lucy and her fellow activists—is arguably modelled on the childhood home of John Ruskin. Until moving to the far grander surrounds of what is now Ruskin Manor in Denmark Hill in 1842, Ruskin grew up in the leafy environment of 28 Herne Hill, demolished in the 1920s by the suburban expansion that he had opposed. It was there that Ruskin wrote his first defence of J. M. W. Turner, and began the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), of which George Eliot later admiringly wrote: “Truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling.” In her essay “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), Eliot expanded on this point by arguing, “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” This drive towards an ever-expanding connectedness, propelled by the realist doctrine that Eliot associated with Ruskin, culminates in the recurrent image of “the web” in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). For each push and pull on the web of human relations, within which each participant focuses on their chosen lot, the only ethical response can be, as the romantic Ladislaw remarks—outscoring the more conventional Lydgate—“the wisdom of balancing claims.” It is precisely this web—this “mesh” in post-Darwinian terms, or these “fractals” as Lucy’s grandfather calls them—which Swift weaves, and with it the need for an enlightened (post)humanism that goes beyond petty individual concerns to acknowledge the rival and mutual interests of others, both human and non-human.
However, whereas Eliot’s web widens across space, Swift’s extends across time, as seemingly small incidents in one place have more dramatic repercussions later in the narrative. It is for this reason that Swift’s novel is so important—because she dramatizes how her characters intervene in the world, and in so doing offers a template for how we might do the same. This is one of the cornerstone questions and purposes for any great work of speculative fiction. Swift’s episodic novel not only alternates between the perspectives of Lucy and Hester but also leaps randomly, a few years at a time. As such, When There Are Wolves Again complements Fredric Jameson’s assertion in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) that “the historical novel of the future … will necessarily be Science-Fictional,” but with none of Jameson’s prescriptiveness. Instead, what Swift gestures towards is a world-historical view that neither totalises—homogenising or flattening future historical realities into a deterministic pattern—nor relativises—leaving floating and disconnected the debris of human experience. What she offers is a kaleidoscopic viewpoint that seeks to understand history both as a whole and as riddled with holes, gaps that allow the imagination to work and the narrative to breathe.
There are two key “what ifs” in Swift’s novel, both of which—in not demanding the impossible—are plausible. The first is that, during the second half of the 2020s, the current Labour government will require a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to stay in power. (As things presently stand, this seems more than likely.) Swift speculates, in what would admittedly be a break with previous coalition governments involving the Liberals, that a severely weakened Labour administration and a Liberal Democrat party, chastened by its experience of government in the 2010s, would result in the Lib Dems sticking to their principles and forcing through a Right to Roam Act. Here, Swift is indebted to Nick Hayes’s polemic The Book of Trespass (2020), which further means that Swift’s narrative is explicitly set into context with the privatisation of common land since the Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent acts of enclosure.
However, whilst the Act, by opening up private land to roamers, enables people like Lucy and her Gran to encounter nature in a way they have never done before, it also facilitates hunters to track down rare species and sell them, alive or dead, at inflated prices. Here, Swift draws upon her earlier short story, “The Endling Market,” originally published in the Unsung Stories anthology 2084 (2017). In the novel’s wider context of accelerating climate change and escalating social dysfunction, it is important to note how Swift balances her optimism with pessimism—as the web of human relations is pulled in every direction, so it is tugged in another—which results in a richer, more complex, and sensitive portrait. This tension is embodied in the relationship between Hester and her brother Jake, a Somerset farmer, who struggles to maintain a living as climate change erodes the land and coastlines, whilst also feeling abandoned by the political mainstream. The rewilding message of Hester’s film, English Savanna (itself inspired by Benedict MacDonald’s real-world proposals for a vast nature reserve on the Somerset Levels, in his book Rebirding [2020]), sets brother and sister against one another. The mounting tensions between farmers and roamers spill over into violence, exacerbated by the interference of the Albion Party, an offspring of Reform, which operates as both a political and terror organisation.
The novel’s second “what if” is also credible in the context of preceding events and the past statements of the characters. Swift speculates that the dying wish of King Charles III, amidst a burning heatwave that has ramifications later in the narrative, is to open the royal estate lands to the public. His bequest to the nation is contested by his children in an eight-year legal dispute (another trope of Victorian fiction, seen memorably in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House [1853]), whilst an encampment of climate change activists, including Lucy, lay siege to the Balmoral estate, with echoes of the Greenham Common women. In order for Swift’s subsequent narrative to work, they are ultimately victorious, but their victory comes at great personal cost. If there is a moral here, it is that success is not ensured, that positive change only has a chance of succeeding if people, on all fronts, are willing to band together in common cause and to persist for as long as it takes.
Indeed, what the second half of the novel suggests is that none of the victories come easily—nothing is granted and nothing can be taken for granted. Here, in her even-handed analysis, Swift criticises the progressive left for simply assuming that, for example, a single worldwide demonstration would stop a war in Iraq or that concessions such as Roe v. Wade were irreversible. Instead, each of her characters’ victories have to be fought for, and to continue to be fought for: Even at the very end of the novel, change is still only commencing. It is not even as black and white as that: As Lucy discovers, “the wisdom of balancing claims” means that uncomfortable negotiations and uneasy truces are the necessary alternative to ever-deepening, ever more violent polarisations. If that sounds like hard work to the reader, then Swift compensates for that by demonstrating the tangible benefits that would spring from a more open, more egalitarian, more ecologically sound Britain. But Swift’s inspirational vision is underscored throughout by the same message: Grow up, take responsibility, collectivise, take action. This political imperative, though, is never simply declared; instead, it is dramatized and interrogated through the actions of the characters and their conflicting points of view.
Although there are direct consequences in Swift’s story arc—the Royal Family, for example, pays for its obstructionism and is replaced by a written constitution—other developments emerge in the margins of her elliptical narrative. We learn that by 2037 the House of Lords has largely been replaced by a Citizens’ Assembly, presumably another consequence of the Lab-Lib Dem coalition. The vast heat dome that envelops western Europe, killing untold numbers of people and other species, accelerates ecologically sustainable programmes, behind which Britain lags due to the long-term effects of Brexit. By contrast, the 2049 Right to Green and Blue Spaces Act initiates a vast rewilding of Britain’s urban, rural, and coastal landscape, albeit only for a further pandemic to strike in 2050. Further afield, the Endling Market continues to grow, and species expire, despite advances in DNA research; the ice caps continue to melt; the US splits into three regions; the Chinese found a moon colony and a human mission to Mars is launched; and US tech bros digitize their memories (although this proves nothing more than a fad). Although each of these marginal events could constitute a storyline in themselves, Swift’s focus is instead upon the common folk and what they can practically do amid the circumstances in which they find themselves. Significantly, as the ecological singularity takes hold, so much of what constitutes our current white noise dissipates: The dream of sentient AI, for instance, remains just that—a pipe dream—although AI retains invaluable uses for those working within the rewilding projects. Swift’s pragmatism is itself an invaluable riposte to the overheated claims that dominate news headlines and social media platforms, and which cloud the clear thinking necessary for adapting to climate change.
By the time the novel ends, not in closure but in an opening-out, Swift has delivered a convincing and sympathetic exploration of what could happen over the next fifty years, given a couple of conceivable changes of heart. At the very least, she indicates the kinds of positive change that could be practically made, instead of more of the doom-mongering proffered by contemporary dystopian fiction. Swift’s liberalism, with more than a nod to such authors of the “condition of England” novel as Dickens, Eliot, and E. M. Forster, can be criticised—like her predecessors—for its lack of revolutionary content. In the novel, for example, the tech bros may have effectively marginalised themselves on an artificial island called Pacifica, but their threat—a clear and present danger as I write this piece—remains, along with the capitalist infrastructure upon which their fortune rests. Although Swift’s novel ends hopefully, it is impossible to say whether the grand rewilding project will continue into the future, bearing in mind that the UK remains, at this point in the future history, separate from the rest of Europe. On the other hand, the nation hasn’t descended into becoming “the Hermit Kingdom” satirised by Ned Beauman in his novel Venomous Lumpsucker (2022), and in the narrative of the book this is in large measure due to the kind of liberalism espoused by Swift. Indeed, in the current context of ultra-right-wing politics masquerading as patriotism and social media-fuelled conspiracy theories parading as truth, Swift’s liberal, democratic, multicultural, and inclusive politics strike this reader as radical.
Despite some reservations, When We Are Wolves Again is not only the novel we have been waiting for from E. J. Swift, one of the UK’s brightest younger talents in speculative fiction, but the novel we also have been waiting for as readers. It is a rallying cry to political activism, a riposte to the myopic Daily Mail/GB News/Reform UK view of life, and a viable demonstration of how we can meet the greatest challenges that face us as a community. If you’re already one of the converted, don’t buy it to feel satisfied about yourself. Buy the novel for that friend you know, who’s wavering between options, who knows something is wrong in the world but can’t yet identify it. Buy it to convert others. In particular, buy two copies—one for your local MP. It is a novel that must talk to power—to persuade it, after five decades of brainwashing: Yes, there is an alternative.
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