The neoliberal culture has led to our complete disconnection from the food we eat, or the clothes we wear. We merely consume, never thinking of where our goods come from, only that they’re in our hands.

With this in mind, Fred Pearce wanted to explore the paths of everyday items, the totems of every day life, from the gold in his wedding ring, to green beans, to our furniture, to the cotton from which his socks are made.

Without agenda, each territory is explored with gentle facts: a pint of mass market lager requires some 24,000 beer miles – transport of crops etc – whereas a pint of local ale requires 600 beer miles at best; Mauritania only abolished slavery in 1981, though it persisted much later than that; Britain is the second largest importer of illegal timber; an explanation of how the EU buys the rights of tropical fish stocks so that they may be strip-mined to the point of no return.

Around this, the harsh detail is built. He follows the ridiculous journey that, for example, our t-shirts take; from cotton farms in Uzbekistan, uncovering the appalling human rights abuses and child and/or slave labour and environmental destruction.

If I can put this simply, our obsession (yes, my obsession too) with ever cheaper jeans is not just helping to sustain the dreadful conditions in Bangladeshi sweatshops, it is also helping enslave the Uzbeks, desecrate their land and finish the emptying of the Aral sea.

Accounts of environmental degradation are dealt with in a very accessible way. Carbon footprints are mentioned here and there; it is shown how intense agriculture destroys the very land on which people depend; how the loss of mangroves creates coastal instability. But the focus is mostly on the people behind our products. Pearce shows the conditions in which people work to bring us our food and clothing (there are some horrendous factories, and where labour laws are poor and unions are weak, it’s barely above the level of slavery). Pearce explores the influence of business and governments in undermining the quality of life of individuals. All of this is done in a conversational style, a gentle “You know, I just wanted to find out where so-and-so came from, and this is what I saw.” It’s not preachy, it’s just a bunch of deeply sad, but occasionally uplifting observations.

The absence of any solutions is rather telling, perhaps, but there are some positive things we can do: yes, generally speaking it’s better to buy organic. Organic Indian cotton farmers are actually more profitable because they’re spending less on pesticides, plus their soil is of a significantly better quality, which means they need to use less water and put less of a strain on resources. Yes, buying Fairtrade products (when not done via major supermarket brands) provides a significantly better quality of life: better prices, more community projects, children with a hope of a future – there is no spin, it does what it’s meant to. Buying local is also a boon – the mileage some of our food takes from field to dinner plate is spectacular. I would like to have seen a more thorough investigation into the politics – how, for example, US and European agriculture subsidies undercut the poorest farmers in developing nations so that they are forced to buy from abroad and become dependent upon them. But perhaps that wouldn’t have sat well with the tone of simple observation.

The most telling thing about this book is that it has prompted me to review how I actually consume items. It’s made me think about where my food and clothes come from. The thing is, if more consumers changed their buying habits, if more consumers questioned companies on where their products were sourced and what they were doing to help promote a fairer existence for workers, then people’s lives in far corners of the world would improve. But that’s unlikely to happen, because as we wonder around the aisles of supermarkets, we do not look these workers in the eye, and we remain unmotivated to change our ways. The neoliberal culture lacks the human touch.

When the bottom line is profit (cheaper prices that customers demand), in the global economy, people lose out massively. It’s often mooted in defence that when we buy crops from foreign farmers, we’re helping them out with an income, and there certainly is some truth in that; but when a surge in our demand for, say, green beans forces women to work illegally long hours and travel home across a dangerous country on their own at night… well, you get the picture. These are the things the balance sheets neglect to observe. People we will never meet are worked to their limits in order to satisfy the whims of our bellies.

I urge everyone to read this book.

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Fred Pearce’s remarkable Confessions of an Eco Sinner is published by Eden Project Books.

Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are The Angels, published by my overlords at Tor UK. Bell has written literary fiction under another name, but this is his genre debut. It’s a post-apocalyptic zombie novel, where the zombies aren’t central to the narrative. Think Cormac McCarthy (the prose really does channel this particular style – even down to the punctuation, such as a lack of quotation marks), and which taxonomically branches off from I Am Legend. Focussing on a young girl called Temple, the narrative follows her arduous road trip across a future USA, a deeply disturbing setting, and one which offers more questions than resolution. Because of these qualities, do not go looking for pulp entertainment: that isn’t to be found here, and Bell neatly bypasses all the zombie uprising froth. Instead he presents us with a connection of haunting images years after the shit has hit the fan, each scene revealing a little more about the world, but never too much to explain it all away.

The prose is marvellous, full of acute observations:

He looks like someone who could slap you or kiss you and you wouldn’t be able to tell which one is coming and it would mean the same thing either way.

And wonderful, heady descriptions:

The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up around her like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbeque shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages.

Temple is a loner for the most part, and even when she pairs up it’s with a mentally ill man, Maury, so we see much of her thoughts projected onto him – a clever move that maintains, possibly even heightens, her sense of isolation. She’s tough – self-sufficient and with a truly lethal edge – but her companionship with Maury betrays her stubborn streak of warmth and compassion. It’s her care of Maury, her quest for his return to safety, which is the subtle narrative drive. For the most part of this journey (a road trip: an American icon), Temple is being hunted across this desolated landscape by Moses Todd, who often catches up with her only for Temple to escape, and we see her at her most human when she is in dialogue with her enemy.

Oh, the zombies. Yeah, they’re there – but as I said, they’re not the stars. The ‘slugs’ are background music for this often horrific landscape, present for a quiet juxtaposition. Because this is a novel of humanity stripped of any humanity, of the raw limits of existence; it’s a flux of dreamy and bleak images, a blurring of the lines between being a human and an animal. And I loved every word of it.

I saw a pretty abysmal review of this in SciFi Now, where the novel was handed to a poor reviewer who gradually betrayed their hope that it would have been something else entirely, instead of exploring the details presented within this text. I wouldn’t like this book to be dismissed so simply, and though I’ve not really championed many current novels (it all feels a little new and awkward for me if I’m honest), I will certainly rally behind this one.

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I’m slowly working my way through many of the Fantasy Masterworks range, and next up was The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip.

Sybel is a woman cut off from the world of Eldwold, and lives in a woodland glade in the mountains, more or less in isolation. But she doesn’t quite live alone: she can communicate telepathically with animals, and has the ability to reach out to their souls. Though it sounds a little twee, I was utterly charmed at this point – it was very well rendered and evocative. A man called Coren, arrives at her cottage and leaves her with a baby, which she is to look after – Tamlorn, the son of a king, and of a queen who has died. If not loved then the child will be found and killed.

A decade or so later, Coren returns for Tamlorn, and Sybel is more than reluctant to hand him over, since she is convinced that he’ll be used as a political weapon. But she gives him up eventually. Numerous chaps arrive at her door, the king, and also Coren, who are both so wrapped up in her beauty, and we’re generally led to believe all men are incredibly stupid and horrible (and throughout the novel, this is almost to the point of misandry). I reflected on this point quite a bit; then I realised women had been so badly treated by male writers for decades – and still do – so this is probably what it feels like. If that was McKillip’s point, which I’m inclined to think it was, then touché, it was bang on the money.

It kind of fell apart a bit at the end, but all in all, it’s a smart, charming rural fantasy.

Weymouth Sands, by John Cowper Powys is a big book in every sense. Set in 1934, it’s a properly interconnected, multi-POV rambling around the town of Weymouth, in Dorset, and discusses the big issues of life, love, death, sexuality, and doesn’t shy away from a spot of philosophy. I couldn’t even begin to summarise the plot in one blog post – kudos to the author for that – but one of the main thrusts is of a brutish man, Jobber Skald, and his intentions to kill the local quarry owner, whilst coming to terms with his affections for newcomer, Perdita Wane. Add to that mix a famous clown and his mad brother (though Powys’s non-judgemental ways of handling the madness were wonderful), a middle-age teacher and his affections for a questionably young lady (whose love is possibly directed elsewhere), a gypsy, a philosopher (Richard Gaul – perhaps a voice of Powy’s himself) and “Hell’s Museum”, a residence / mad-house in which experiments on people and dogs take place… you get the picture. All in all, it’s like Thomas Hardy on acid, and if you can get to grips with the intense exposition – which I loved – and the representation of the local dialect, then it’s worth picking up in order to discover this often-forgotten classic writer.

Perhaps reacting to the horrid smoke and grime experienced during my trip to London, I bought Wildwood, by Roger Deakin. Like any example of nature writing, it’s as much about the author’s relation with the natural world than nature per se, and I couldn’t help at times but feel that it was a kind of rich-boy childhood reminiscence fetish (I know, I said to myself, I’ll just buy a Tudor house with a moat – anyone can do it!). It was good, cleansed me of the Big City, but never really scratched my itch. Instead, I had to pick up Richard Mabey’s fantastic Flora Britannica, which is one of the best books around for understanding how the natural world really is a foundation of British culture, and how plants still play a significant role in our lives.

I shall return to the fantasy genre shortly.