Finishing this book, I had two immediate reactions. This person is a good writer and this book doesn’t quite hit the mark. Or maybe it’s because the mark the writer was trying to hit isn’t made exactly clear, and for all the gumption it took to put forth some novel conception of ecology under the big-stroke, theoretical sounding “second body,” the book doesn’t quite deliver. Over its brief length we are treated to some very professorial lit crit, personal essay, and journalistic interviews. It’s all a bit jumbled, and didn’t do much for me in terms of illuminating the idea of a “second body” other than in its broadest definition. If was to understand this idea on concrete level, I think this book would have to be two or three times as long, fleshed out with more examples from science, economy, and sociology to explain the necessary process of psychic expansion needed if we are to tackle the effects of climate change caused by the vast accumulation of individual consumption among wealthier members of the human community. But the writer explicitly sets herself against this abstract line of thinking and instead tries to understand the “second body” idea from a more subjective place. However, I feel like this does a disservice to the very objective nature of ecological destruction. Perhaps she felt that the marketplace was already thick with climate change books attacking the issue from this angle - this is true. But her more personal exploration of the topic is, to my eyes, not successful, padded as it is with interviews and literary analysis, that while well-written and interesting, seemed only tangential to the topic at hand.

The more interesting subtext of the “second body” idea, one that didn’t seem explicitly explored to me, was as a phantom of climate change induced anxiety that has come to haunt any informed member of the developed world. While the author never says that this is the genesis of the “second body” idea, I recognized thoughts parallel to my own, thoughts born of trying to wrap your head around the slow motion disaster that has been playing out my entire life and will continue until I die. We are told that climate change is driven by consumption, the avarice of global capitalism, the unfettered growth required for the functioning of society. And yet where do we draw the lines between us and this nightmare? How to account for our own responsibility? The writer seems hew this frontier right up against that of her literal flesh, making the reverberations of her wants, needs, money spent and decisions made into a phantom reaching out across the world. It’s a radical and radically unpleasant conception to live with, but perhaps one necessarily born of the situation we find ourselves facing as individuals and as a species. It’s unfortunate that this book doesn’t find time to more deeply explore this aspect.

I picked up this book because I couldn’t find Hildyard’s new novel online yet after seeing it on the Fitzcarraldo Editions website - I still plan on reading that when I get the chance, as I really enjoyed the style and topic of this book here. ( )