Review
Books
Climate
Culture
4 min read

The rude guests

The Earth Transformed chronicles what happens when civilisation comes up against environmental change. Hannah Eves reviews Peter Frankopan’s analysis.

Hannah Eves is a policy officer at A Rocha UK, a Christian nature charity working to protect and restore nature in the UK and equip individuals and churches to care for creation. 

The head and torso of a mannequin lie abandoned in undergrowth
Dragon Pan on Unsplash.

In his meditation on nature, The Peace of Wild Things, the agrarian poet Wendell Berry writes: ‘When despair for the world grows in me… I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought.’ The despair Berry describes sounds a lot like climate anxiety, the fear or worry about the environmental doom that more and more people are feeling, because anyone who has understood recent climate and biodiversity trends has been burdened with forethought on behalf of wild things. It’s a forethought that can lead very easily to despair. Only last month, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued its most serious warning yet about irreversible levels of global heating and the catastrophic impacts the world is facing without drastic action to address climate breakdown. Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres issued this warning: ‘Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast… In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts -- everything, everywhere, all at once.’  

While climate change is often seen as a modern political issue, the question of how to understand or adapt to changes in the natural world, and failures to do so, is not unique to the last century. In fact, it’s foundational to all of history, so argues historian Peter Frankopan in his new book The Earth Transformed. Frankopan charts a path from the dawn of time through development of human civilisation and empire up to the making of the modern world asserting that underpinning everything that has ever happened (ever) is a central relationship of transformation. The natural environment shaped the development of human civilisation and humanity has ‘expanded, colonised, reproduced, created and dominated’, but also ‘destroyed, devastated and exterminated’, the natural landscape.  

Frankopan shows how environmental fluctuations and changes have shaped the course of history. For example, he tells the story of how a ‘mighty civilisation’ folded in on itself in the face of environmental catastrophe. Around 2253 BC Naram-Sin ruled over the Akkadian empire (in Mesopotamia in modern Iraq) during which ‘The Curse of Akkad’ grips the empire. Said to be a divine judgement of Naram-Sin’s rule and ‘insulting behaviour’, the curse was a period of drought and crop failure, leading to price inflation, mass death and political chaos. Climate data shows that what actually happened was an ‘evaporation event’ leading to drought impacting most severely areas that were ecologically sensitive and having such a ripple effect as to prompt what one scholar called a ‘Dark Age’ of ecological collapse and political instability. Frankopan notes, ‘changes in climate had brought about nothing less than the collapse of the Akkadian empire.’ 
The Earth Transformed places human beings within a wider context of all creation, not only transforming the natural world but being shaped and transformed by it. In fact, human beings are like ‘rude guests’ who arrive late, cause havoc and destroy the house to which they have been invited. We are a new and late arrival in the grand scheme of history and yet our impact on the natural world has been substantial and has pushed scientists to the point of questioning the long-term viability of human life.  

However, we are not alone in transforming the world around us; nature is not a passive force but actively ‘involved in the process of change, adaptation and evolution, sometimes with devastating consequences’. And so, Frankopan insightfully illustrates how nature underpins everything that makes our lives possible. It’s not simply that environmental factors are actors in the story of our species, they ‘provide the very stage on which our existence plays out, shaping everything we do, who we are, where and how we live.’ And yet, we are living on the edge of our means and are dependent on ‘everything to go right and with little margin of error for things to go wrong.’  

The book closes with this harrowing warning that ‘it would be nature, rather than human action, that ultimately brings net emissions towards zero’ through ‘catastrophic depopulation, whether through hunger, disease or conflict’. With fewer people on the planet to use up the earth’s resources by burning fuel, cutting forests down or tearing minerals from the ground, the carbon footprint of humanity would plummet, and we would get closer to a ‘lush paradise of our fantasised past’. Frankopan concludes: ‘Perhaps we will find our way back there through peaceful means: a historian would not bet on it.’  

It’s somewhat of a cliche to say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and yet Frankopan’s book shows how if we don’t take the capacity of nature and the climate to transform us we are not just doomed to repeat ourselves, but, well, doomed. Published in the same month that the IPCC has issued its final warning on 1.5 degrees, The Earth Transformed presents both a fascinating and essential lens to view history through in such a time as this. 

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan is published by Bloomsbury.  

Review
Belief
Culture
Film & TV
4 min read

Heretic: Hugh Grant’s brilliance wrestles this tranquilized take on holy horror

If not original, a dissection of belief needs to be sincere and agile.
A man looks scarily upwards.
Hugh Grant prepares to eviscerate the script.

Halloween night: the perfect setting for a horror film. Religious horror: the perfect horror sub-genre. The supernatural invading the natural, darkness swallowing the light, tension and suspense assaulting the placidity we all crave, and doubt gnawing away at faith. All these reversals of the order we try to live in are on offer in Heretic. This is a ghoulish and ghastly offering from writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are no strangers to the genre. In Heretic they bring the best that horror cinema has to offer: simplicity.  

The plot and script are lean enough to effortlessly perform the twists and contortions needed to keep the viewer off-guard and on the edge of their seat. The script is tight, with some wonderful opportunities to soliloquise and dialogue that is deliciously awkward and painful. The camera work is almost cruel in its relentlessness. This is not a film of jump scares. Here the camera lingers, and lingers…and lingers. Tight close ups on frightened faces and sinister smiles. Slow pans round a room, promising a sudden shock of relief that never comes – only more anxiety.  

The camera refuses to make the experience easy, but insists on letting the atmosphere and semiotics drive the audience to the point of tears. Such a focused and aggressive camera needs performers who won’t shy away but will grab it and wrestle with it! Thankfully, the performances are superb across the board. It's basically a three-hander, carried by Sophie East, Chloe Thatcher, and the indominable Hugh Grant (more about him later).  

East and Thatcher play two young Mormon missionaries – Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes - who spend their days walking the streets of a small American town in the mountains. In between dispiriting attempts to communicate their faith with an apathetic and even derisive public, they wile away the hours discussing their faith, their hopes and dreams, the perception of Mormonism in the popular culture, and the marketing of ‘magnum condoms’. Sister Paxton is earnest and zealous, desperate to prove herself as a missionary by converting at least one person. Sister Barnes is a little more reserved, almost cynical. There is less fervour, a hint of weariness, even the lurking sense of doubt? 

The two young ladies end an exhausting day with a visit to an isolated mountain-top cottage where they believe the seemingly kindly and bumbling English gent, Mr. Reed, is a prospective convert. Who else bumbles like Hugh Grant? It’s a joy to watch. What they hope will be a pleasant chat about their faith slowly descends into a horrifying and twisted psychological torture session, where the concepts of faith, doubt, religion, prophesy, and institutional thinking are all examined.  

I dare not say much more. This is a film which hides its twists well and uses the mundanities of blueberry pie and Monopoly to chillingly hilarious effect.  

However… 

Having heaped praise upon praise, I must admit that I left the cinema feeling slightly disappointed. I love horror cinema. I love religion – so much so that I’ve made it my day job. I love them in combination that appears pretty frequently, from the giddy heights of The Exorcist to the drudgery that is The Exorcist: Believer. This means that most of the themes that can be explored have been explored. Originality is nearly impossible, and not really necessary – but exploring the themes with sincerity and agility would be nice. The script might be acrobatic, but the thematic exposition is about as plodding as a tranquilised elephant with a limp. 

It is bad. 

Again, I don’t want to give the twists and turns away, but quite quickly a dissonance between the brilliance of the dialogue and the turgidity of the theme appears, and it doesn’t…go…away! What is faith and what is doubt? Good. What is belief and what is disbelief? Good. No. Scrap that. ‘RELIGION IS ALL JUST MAN MADE!’ Okay, we could explore that. ‘NO. JESUS IS BASICALLY HORUS.’ Right, but let’s tease out the nuance. ‘NO! RELIGION IS JUST A SYSTEM OF CONTROL!’  

Mr Reed suddenly morphs into the most tiresome bore. A cross between the theological illiteracy of Dawkins and the pathological obsession with power of Foucault. It is possible that this is part of the point – that this was intended to be a witty and incisive invective against institutionalism (especially institutionalised misogyny), and the ladies do land some philosophical counterpunches which expose the emptiness of Mr Reed’s rantings – but it just wasn’t done subtly or adeptly enough. What promises to be a thematic exposition of the nature of belief turns into a fairly lumbering and ponderous lecture on how belief full-stop is a ‘system of control’. We get it. We’ve been hearing this for centuries, and at a new fever pitch since the early noughties. Again…originality isn’t essential if the same old theme is explored well. I just didn’t feel it was. I felt it was a chore. 

Yet (another twist coming!), Mr Reed is still compelling. However boring the thematic content, I was never bored. Hugh Grant is superlative as the sinister, fanatical, hateful, charming, charismatic, hilarious Mr Reed. He delivers lines filled with acid yet dipped in honey. He smiles that singular smile as both wolf and lamb at once. His eyes twinkle with light that is both warm and yet dead and cold. He delivers laugh out loud speeches with absolute relish. The theme might be being butchered, but when the butcher is Hugh Grant you sort of forgive it all.  

I would advise you see this film. It's excellent on every technical level and an almost perfect tension builder. It's not perfect, and those who are genuinely interested in the theme are likely to roll their eyes as the early promise of interesting study devolves into something sub-Sam Harris. But ignore that and just enjoy the twists and turns. Ignore it and focus on Hugh Grant. He’s never been better. 

 

**** Stars.