Sometimes I like to fantasize about how I’d cope with the end of the world—or, at least, the end of our relatively comfortable and stable society. I’m hardly a doomsday prepper, and I’m pretty sure that my gangly, over-friendly self would barely last a few days into the apocalypse, but it’s a fascinating hypothetical for two reasons: firstly, because the climate crisis brings the possibility that we may someday actually have to face this as a reality, and secondly, because it prompts a certain amount of self-reflection. What is your capacity for self-reliance, for cooperation with others, and ultimately, how is your mental and physical resilience? Even if you’re lucky enough to have your own fully-stocked bunker, would your values, connections, and integrity survive intact?
This is the scenario faced by Kit, protagonist and narrator of Natasha Calder’s first solo novel, Whether Violent or Natural. As I’d previously reviewed her excellent co-written work, The Offset, which deals with environmental catastrophe in the form of climate change, I was eager to explore her latest take on the apocalypse.
Written from a unique first-person perspective, it’s obvious from the outset that something is wrong. Dwelling in an abandoned bunker beneath a crumbling castle, Kit’s extensive study of encyclopaedias combine with her complete lack of socialisation to create a deeply unsettling voice:
Even the stars are still and silent, not singing to me like they sometimes do on a cloudless night, not twinkling out their astral boasts for all to read and weep. I don’t mind. Stars don’t stay quiet for long, not if they can help it, swanking vanities that they are. (p. 9)
Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s poetic outcasts, Kit is eloquent yet disconnected, quick-witted yet naive, knowledgeable while at the same time deeply ignorant. And she isn’t alone.
We’re also introduced to Crevan, a seemingly grumpy and much less verbose individual whose quirks are no less odd. From the outset Kit introduces Crevan as ‘paranoid,’ ‘delusional,’ and ‘deranged,’ though his role seems to be that of Kit’s guardian. We’re left with a great many questions as to their relationship, and though Crevan appears to be a grown man, Kit’s wide-eyed sense of wonder and childish temper tantrums leave her age ambiguous. The two are platonic, and sleep in separate rooms, yet whether Crevan is father, mentor, or friend is left to the reader to decode:
But maybe he is as frightened as I am, as disturbed and as put out. Maybe it’s even worse for him than it is for me. Maybe when he says that I’m panicked, that I need to get a grip, I really should be the one saying it to him. Maybe taking care of me gives him a way to take care of himself too. (p. 50)
The bond between these two troubled individuals drives the story, and was the main draw that kept me turning page after page. There’s a constant, ever-present distance between the two, but their maladapted affection for one another is compelling, and our perceptions of each are played with throughout the entire story.
So why are these two alone in a bunker together? Like The Offset, Calder’s latest novel presents us with an environmental apocalypse and subsequent social collapse; yet while The Offset gave us a world ravaged by carbon, Whether Violent or Natural’s reality is formed via microbes. Like many, I’ve long been terrified of growing antibiotic resistance, lamenting the mass feeding of antibiotics to cattle and people taking them for the common cold. I’m not alone in this fear, and Calder exploits such a scenario to its fullest potential:
It is our fault, you know, entirely our fault—we have been tempting fate for years; we use our precious antibiotics recklessly, extravagantly, behaving as though they are an endless panacea, a bottomless well of clean water that may be dipped into as much and as often as we please. We are profligate like you wouldn’t believe. (p. 55)
Unable to cope with runaway infections of all kinds, urban life and medical institutions collapse. Yet I don’t believe this familiar vision of apocalypse—one of ruin, dysfunction, and violence—is truly the point of the novel. Calder’s work gets to something deeper, and more personal.
Whether Violent or Natural’s central theme is ultimately the breakdown of trust. Firstly, our reckless use of lifesaving medications and the resulting environmental upheaval causes a collapse in trust on a wider societal level: institutions require trust to operate. When medical science fails the population, the population stops trusting medical specialists. In this chaos, doctors are something to be hated and feared, and it seems absolutely no coincidence that Calder wrote this story during the global pandemic. Yet while our world saw fear spread via disinformation, the failures which bring about the world of Calder’s novel are very real—a result of wider societal hubris when it comes to our planet’s microbial ecosystems.
However, this breakdown in trust isn’t limited to medical establishments. The abuse of antibiotics and their resultant failure causes a collapse in wider societal cohesion. Kit’s grown up in a world that equates trust with danger. She lives in hiding because the outside world isn’t safe for her, so when an unconscious woman washes to the shore of Kit’s island, Kit is convinced that she represents a very real threat, giving us one of my favourite quotes from the novel: “‘We can’t keep her,’ I croak. ‘It’s strictly no pets’” (p. 23). Kit doesn’t even trust the grumpy Crevan, and despite their proximity she maintains a vast mental and emotional distance from him. Kit’s general lack of trust in turn devastates her own humanity.
So far, so apocalyptic. I mean, it’s common for post-collapse worlds to lack this sense of social trust. It would be easy to stop here, but Calder takes the concept further. Though Kit is an extremely knowledgeable and entertaining narrator, her poor mental health and lurid fantasy life also make her an unreliable one. Having lost her family and everyone she knew in her old life, her intense trauma and lack of healthy socialisation have led to a loose grasp of reality, and thereby impact her inner narrative. The breakdown in trust takes place on all levels, from the societal to the deeply personal. Not only has trust broken down between the people and their authorities, as well as with one another, but we can’t even trust the words we’re presented with on the page.
I feel like I’ve written the world ‘trust’ fifty times in the past few paragraphs, but growing up in a stable Western society, it’s easy to take trust for granted. We trust that the streets will be maintained. That our packages will be delivered. That we’re safe passing a stranger in the street. We trust new people, and invite them into our lives as potential friends, neighbours, lovers. Yet, as we’ve seen over the past few years, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, all this trust is eroded by instability. It doesn’t matter if that instability is brought about by disease or via the climate catastrophe. Destroying our environmental security destroys what is arguably our most important human asset.
Yet trust isn’t all that’s eroded here. We also get glimpses into the silver linings of social collapse – namely the lack of social expectation. One scene which stuck out for me as a big old nonbinary person was Kit’s lack of perceived gender:
…I had the island to myself for ever such a long time. There was no one to affront, no one to offend. No one to map me out and say: You are like this, you should be like that. No one to say: But you are a woman and I am a man, it is improper. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten there were such things as men and women before Crevan arrived, forgotten there were such divisions and categories to know and learn. I still struggle to remember it now—or rather, struggle to remember how they apply to me. I am just myself. I have always been just myself. (p. 40)
It’s a brief and relatively minor moment in the novel, but it’s one which really stuck with me, if for no other reason than the fact that it simply and elegantly lays out how I feel about my own gender identity. Though Whether Violent or Natural grapples with wider issues, it’s also filled with these small moments in which Calder thoughtfully speculates on the personal and psychological outcomes of collapse, going beyond pure negativity and horror.
Just as the reader settles into the setting, the plot undergoes a significant twist—and Kit’s status as an unreliable narrator is confirmed when we discover exactly how much she’s been keeping from us. As we aren’t told the whole story until this point, it makes it extremely difficult to cover in a review without spoiling the text, but I’ll do my best. It’s too integral to the overall story to be avoided.
Kit eventually reveals her own past. Her parents, medical researchers grappling with the advent of antibiotic resistance, discovered what is essentially the antidote. However, mass death had already ensued and the social damage had been done. The true infection was distrust, and though doctors were ready to administer the cure, by this point much of the public simply didn’t want it. Kit’s family became a target of those who were clinging to superstition, folk cures, and scapegoating—with Kit herself disfigured by mob violence. Her island refuge was no accident. Though she has every reason to distrust the mainland, we don’t know the full extent of the supposed apocalypse.
So how is this a book tackling the impact of apocalyptic environmental change if there’s potentially no apocalypse? This is the mystery which emphasizes the novel’s deeper theme. As with climate change and global pandemics, we absolutely have the ability to avoid catastrophe, but we’re held back by social obstacles—namely, disinformation and distrust. We can only implement solutions when we have mutual cooperation and a shared narrative. To what extent the world outside Kit’s island has collapsed depends on how far violence and superstition have spread, and it’s here that Whether Violent or Natural truly shines, showing us the intimate connection between social bonds and environmental challenges. In the end, trust is the scarcest resource, and the apocalypse becomes a certainty once we’ve exhausted it.
Upending the story in its later stages does muddy things, and we lose some of the terrifying wonder we’re presented with earlier on. Though some might find the redirected plot unsatisfying, I appreciate the ambiguity: to what extent the world has collapsed depends on the reader’s interpretation, and is ultimately rooted in our own optimism or cynicism. I particularly enjoyed the final pages, which end on an unsettling note befitting the mood we’ve been presented with from the very start.
As Calder’s first solo novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whether Violent or Natural. Yet the strong narrative voice delighted me, immediately drawing me in to this dark vision of a post-antibiotic apocalypse, while continuing to claw at my attention via the twisted bond between Kit and Crevan. I was hooked to the last page. Not all readers will connect to the novel’s later stages, particularly those looking for a plot centered around unambiguous environmental collapse. But what we have instead is a thoughtful exploration of what is lost when we treat technology so carelessly—specifically the damage wrought to social bonds on all levels—and I found it an extremely worthwhile read.
