We saw that the situation was bad, elsewhere, but surely things would work out, because didn’t they always, for us?” “We had the habit of luck and power,” thinks Caro, living in a sanctuary from climate disaster, “and couldn’t understand that they were not our right. “Looking at them, at the numbers of them, you would have thought them infinite, you would have thought there could be no end to them, to their profusion.”Ĭharacters in the English writer’s new novel, The High House, wonder at their own finite prosperity. They hunted the birds for meat and feathers, burned their fat-rich bodies whole for fuel or just stamped on their eggs out of spite. A sailor remembers the years at the beginning of the 19th century when he and others wiped out a waterbird related to the razorbill. In her 2015 short story collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, the eponymous opening story is an extinction retrospective. Jessie Greengrass, from first publication, has been preoccupied with our capacity to kill things or let them die.
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