The Economist February 6th 2021 Books & arts 69long held on politics by the mqm, a party
representing Mohajir interests, run for
years by its pudgy but oddly charismatic
leader, Altaf Hussain, from exile in Lon-
don. The links between militias, gangsters
and mainstream politics became harder to
disentangle in Karachi than anywhere else
in Pakistan. “Every street criminal had a
political affiliation,” notes Ms Shackle, “ev-
ery political party had its fingerprints all
over multiple criminal enterprises.”
The book has a happy ending—up to a
point. The violence has been restrained
and the mqm diminished as a political
force. But the village of the poorest of Ms
Shackle’s characters suffers outrageous ex-
propriation. And the crime reporter re-
mains sceptical of the changes: “The situa-
tion is under control, but it is not peace.”
“Karachi Vice” recalls “Maximum City”
(published in 2004), Suketu Mehta’s epic
chronicle of another South Asian megacity,
Bombay (now Mumbai), which also told its
story through the lives of vividly drawn in-
dividuals. Ms Shackle’s book differs in be-
ing much shorter, and, unlike Mr Mehta’s,
in seeing her city largely through the eyes
of good people trying to make a terrible sit-
uation better. It is a moving account of the
struggles of everyday heroes—and of the
unhappy metropolis that needs them.
Eco-fiction
Sea change
T
hevogueforemotiveliteraryengage-
ments with the natural world—known
as the “new nature writing” and encom-
passing the work of Amy Liptrot, Helen
Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane—can be
interpreted as a form of mourning, an at-
tempt to fix on the page a beauty and varie-
ty that are vanishing. Landscapes, sea-
scapes and wild creatures are described by
these writers just as they slip away because
of climate change and the loss of habitats.
The debut novel by Charlotte McCo-
naghy, an Australian author, is a fascinat-
ing hybrid of nature writing and dystopian
fiction. The reader meets Franny Lynch,
the book’s protagonist, in Tasiilaq, Green-
land, some time in the not-so-distant fu-
ture. Human activity has reduced biodiver-
sity to a handful of creatures at the edges of
the globe. Franny is an ornithologist, tag-
ging the last remaining Arctic terns before
theirlongmigration south.
For reasons that are not entirely clear,
Ennis Malone, the grizzled captain of a
fishing trawler, is persuaded to follow the
terns south. There are strong echoes of
“Moby Dick” in his dreams of “the Golden
Catch”, a great bounty and his own white
whale, and in a sea fished and polluted to
the point of extinction. Franny joins the
crew—a motley, charismatic bunch—as
they head off, with some trepidation, in
search of the terns and the fabled catch.
The new nature writing places the per-
sonal, emotional response of the author at
the centre of its representation of the natu-
ral world. The bird of prey in “H is for
Hawk” helps Ms Macdonald get closer to
her dead father; Ms Liptrot turns to the rug-
ged beauty of Orkney to tackle her alcohol-
ism. Similarly, in this novel the narrative
of the fishing voyage is interwoven with
the tale of Franny’s difficult, itinerant up-
bringing, her tricky marriage to Niall, an
environmentalist and university lecturer,
and the dark secrets that she carries with
her and may explain her volatile temper
and self-destructive impulses.
Recently the climate crisis has dom-
inated literary dystopias, spawning anoth-
er new genre: cli-fi. From Margaret At-
wood’s “The Year of the Flood” to John Lan-
chester’s “The Wall”, authors have consid-
ered how rising temperatures will change
human life. Ms McConaghy’s novel may be
the first in the genre to put the animal
world at the centre of its story, mourning
dying species and asking what might hap-
pen when people forget “what it feels like
to love creatures that aren’t human”.
These grand ambitions do not always
cohere. The seafaring yarn is gripping, but
Franny remains an enigma, the flashbacks
to her early life interrupting the story’s
flow. Yet by merging cli-fi and nature writ-
ing, the novel powerfully demonstrates the
spiritual and emotional costs of environ-
mental destruction. Migrations. By Charlotte McConaghy.
Flatiron Books; 272 pages; $26.99.
Published in Britain as “The Last Migration”;
Chatto & Windus; £12.99
World’s endThe death of ageWho wants to live
for ever?
“O
ldageisa massacre,”wrotePhilip
Roth, long before the pandemic un-
derscored its hazards. Even those who
count as young must often watch the in-
eluctable drift of loved ones into decrepi-
tude. Andrew Steele has a hopeful message
for all those facing this prospect (ie, every-
one). Old age needn’t be a massacre; in fact,
old age needn’t even be old.
Mr Steele’s thesis in “Ageless” is that
ageing can be cured—and, at least in part,
that it very soon will be. The giant tortoises
of the Galapagos Islands show no age-re-
lated decline, in some ways seeming as
youthful at 170 as at 30. Mr Steele thinks
this phenomenon, known as negligible se-
nescence, is within humanity’s grasp, too.
Whether or not readers are persuaded
that ageless humans could ever be more
than a theoretical possibility—and it is a
stretch—this book will convince them that
discounting the theoretical possibility al-
together is based on nothing but prejudice.
Western art may have something to do
with it, bristling as it is with morality tales
about the folly of wanting to turn back the
clock; but there is actually no good reason
to assume an upper limit to longevity, or
that ageing must come with decline. And
there is quite a lot of evidence to the con-
trary. Without the rich world’s denizens
really noticing, a life that ends after the
biblical three score years and ten has al-
ready come to seem a life cut short; in-
stead, 90 is now seen as a good innings.
This prejudice held back the field of
biogerontology for a very long time, but in
the past few decades some scientists have
cast it aside. This has enabled them to see
that the real folly lies in the attempt to cure
the diseases of old age one by one, rather
than tackling their underlying cause—age-
ing itself. Now they are trying to under-
stand that process in all its extraordinary
complexity, and to intervene much earlier.
They have many tools at their disposal,
and Mr Steele, who has a background in
computational biology, evaluates them ex-
pertly and with verve. They range from
drugs that mimic the life-extending effects
of dietary restriction to gene-editing tools
such as crisprand computer models that
simulate whole biological systems. Such
models may eventually prove the key that
unlocks the inner Methuselah in everyone,
by revealing both the limits to these sys-Ageless.By Andrew Steele. Doubleday;
352 pages; $29. Bloomsbury; £20