“Cabin”, by Abel Quentin, L’Observatoire, 480 p., €22, digital €15.
Abel Quentin, not yet 40 years old, is a novelist who deals with big subjects. His first book, Sister (L’Observatoire, 2019), talks about Islamist terrorism, of which he has first-hand knowledge, having, as a lawyer, defended jihadists. The second, The Seer of Etampes (L’Observatoire, 2021), is a dark comedy about cancel culture. And here it is Hut, who talks about the collapse.
We are all aware that we have arrived at a historical moment where optimists expect the end of the world as we know it and pessimists expect the end of the world altogether. Until fairly recent times, it could still be said that man, since Antiquity, has always repeated that things were better before, that he always believed the apocalypse was imminent, but today this millennial, irrational fear has become both scientific and everyday experience obvious: we can turn our heads, try to think of something else, but we are still there.
Faced with such a huge phenomenon, it is surprising that so many people who write continue to do so as if nothing had happened, as if, at the wheel of a car that will in a few seconds crash into a tractor-trailer, they continued to tune the car radio in search of their favorite playlist. But I am being unfair in saying this: many people who write are looking for a way to write about it, in fact. A publisher friend told me that a good half of the manuscripts he receives are dystopias. A really striking novel is the recent Ministry of the Futureby science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson (Bragelonne, 2023), which opens with a memorable description of a heat wave in India, from the point of view of its millions of victims, and then tells, in thriller form, the work of an institution aiming to represent the interests of future generations – if there are any – before those responsible for these disasters.
Exactly everything that is happening to us today
Abel Quentin talks about the same thing, but he goes about it differently. He starts from a real report, the Meadows Report, commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome and published in 1972 under the title “The Limits to Growth (in a Finite World)”. Fifty-two years ago, the Meadows Report predicted exactly what is happening to us today. It was then possible to escape this inevitability. This report was read and discussed even by the general public. It troubled some minds. Others, more numerous, called its authors Cassandras. We shrugged our shoulders and moved on. Business as usual : the eternal story.
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