It’s fantastic that someone has finally had the courage and the tenacity to write a novel addressing the Mother of all elephants in the room: Human ecological overshoot – a combination of out-of-control human numbers and out-of-control consumption that are rapidly wiping out the biosphere and turning this small blue planet into a toxic dump. Those of us on the frontlines of conservation weep at the daily extinction of over 150 species, lost forever on the sacrificial altar of mainstream culture’s decree that people should reproduce and consume as much as they please, and anyone who says otherwise is an eco-fascist and a misanthrope.
Most humans now live in their own bubbles and completely divorced from wild nature by many generations. They have no visceral and little intellectual understanding that our existence depends on the health of the biosphere we daily continue to degrade, and in their unsustainable urban feedlots made possible by industrial agriculture and big oil live lives of abstraction from this basic reality which is wiping out over 150 species a day while we consider ourselves immune, if we consider the question at all.
However skilled on the exterior or intellectually acclaimed, psychologically many modern humans are now toddlers: Me myself I, easily distracted and manipulated by authority figures and peer pressure, the little they see of the world IS the world, little insight into complex interpersonal or ecological realities. Many adults also have a great deal of hubris that renders them blind to these fatal flaws and largely useless for further learning outside their human bubble, to whose tenets they display a cultlike emotional attachment.
And facts don’t have much impact; like Creationists, we ignore or explain away facts that are inconvenient or frightening, invent alternative facts, and have faith in our cult. And so, we have come to this: To almost unquestioning lives in a system that creates our financial wealth by cannibalising and poisoning non-human Life on Earth, with most of us too far removed from the frontlines of this destruction to even see it, let alone our own connection to it; and a system that enslaves much of our own species into the bargain for the principal benefit of the rich and powerful.
From an educational perspective, facts are not enough for human learning. We need engagement with stories, novels, poetry, music, visual art to really learn something, more than superficially and intellectually. To walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, to try on other perspectives, to learn to question the tenets of our cult, and to really learn deep in our hearts, where it matters. My English teacher in senior high school – one Simon Fraser Macphail – knew this, and engaged us with such things, to learn what it is to be human, in the good and in the terrible sense of that both, and to open us to questioning ourselves and the dystopia we had been born into alike. If you are looking at shadows, don’t forget to also look into your own heart.
I am forever grateful to Simon Fraser Macphail, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Rudyard Kipling, WB Yeats, JM Synge, JRR Tolkien, JMW Turner, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Judith Wright, MC Escher, Suzanne Vega, John Wyndham, Hans Christian Andersen, Evelyne Kolnberger, James Herriot, Josef Carl Grund, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Pink Floyd, Wilfred Owen, Sinéad O’Connor, Kate Grenville, Anna Fienberg, Roger McGough, Val McDermid, Minette Walters, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, e.e. cummings, The Cure, Haruki Murakami, JK Rowling, Joanne Harris, Jeannette Winterson, CS Lewis and so many more for teaching me things that really mattered, and continue to matter very deeply to me.
I also thank Niki Baker for writing 10:59, to give readers a fictional universe to slip into in which to properly contemplate a number of confronting existential issues arising from the predicament humans have created and for which there are no easy solutions – or at this point, arguably any solutions, only palliative care.
Were I still teaching, I would set 10:59 as an accessible middle school text to aid in the contemplation of the macrocosm of our manufactured hell, in tandem with Anna Fienberg’s Borrowed Light, which I have set as an excellent introduction to the anatomy of intergenerational trauma; i.e. the microcosm of our manufactured hell. At 14, human brains are usually switching into formal operational mode, intrigued by complex phenomena and highly interested in questioning the family and social systems into which fate has thrown them. Adults in their circle should help rather than hinder them on their existential quest, and support their experiments with flight rather than clip their wings and jam them back into the jail we have made for ourselves. Stories, poetry, music and art are as essential to this as explicitly teaching critical thinking, natural sciences, psychology and philosophy, and modelling open, honest, constructive conversations.
10:59 isn’t just a rare book dealing honestly with human overshoot and the associated ecological and social apocalypse, it is also highly readable, courtesy of being superbly written, with well-above-average fact-checking and thoroughly relatable central characters. Despite its dark subject, there are plenty of wry laughs to be had at the tragicomedy of our much-hyped modern Western democracies, social institutions, and lifestyle. Niki Baker points a probing lens at a plethora of issues that result from the corruption and incompetence of the power class and their enablers, and from our society’s unwillingness to respect planetary boundaries. The unfortunate reality explored in this novel is that despite our overhyped cerebrums, our species is behaving exactly like bacteria in a laboratory culture, which will grow exponentially to exploit all available resources until finally crashing in a toxic cesspit of their own making. This is what happens when you remove a species from the normal checks and balances of the ecological community, which our society long eschewed in favour of the doctrine of human exceptionalism.
In the absorbing exposition of this novel, the author presents human snapshots of various crucial issues that usually aren’t given much thought in everyday life, and exposes us to scenes we do not normally witness but are the direct result of our way of life on other people and on Planet Earth. Many drawbacks of our civilisation for most of its citizens are also shown, including the rent-and-bill-paying treadmill that results in children having very little quality time with their stressed-out parents during the working week, and our general social atomisation, with consequential impacts on people’s emotional and social wellbeing. The lunacy of our political system and the kinds of people who end up making important decisions is amply on display in the narrative, and deservedly so.
Niki Baker has a knack for writing characters that readers can care about very quickly. The beating heart of 10:59 is Louis Crawford, a thoughtful teenager with a big heart in his final year of high school. A school project changes his life forever as it brings him to the attention of an international environmental company, who become his first employer. We follow him from school into the commencement of a working life that throws him a completely unexpected turn, and have a front seat to his grappling with the ethical and practical implications of this turn, which he cannot discuss with anyone outside of work but will profoundly affect everyone he holds dear. Through walking in Louis’ shoes, we are forced to think about what we would do in his position, which sets us a good chunk of ethical and emotional homework necessary and long overdue for dealing with our own lives as well.
Readers may, like myself, be suspicious of the money floating around Phoenix and wonder about the true characters of its key players. More tension and suspense is fuelled by the dark machinations of an intelligence agency with its inevitable complement of obvious prize sociopaths. And then there’s a young guy at Louis’ work, and a deconstruction of his childhood, the sort that gravely injures children but doesn’t necessarily turn them into sociopaths…be prepared to do a lot of reflecting when reading this novel.
Great to see environmental issues alongside an excursion into the human condition in a dystopian novel – highly recommended. This is more applicable than Camus, who like most modern Western thinkers principally confined his serious thinking to the human bubble – and it’s anthropocentrism and egotism which are the main drivers of the destruction we visit on other members of the human and ecological communities, and which contain in them our own downfall.
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆