“A STRANGE FAIRYTALE:” REPRESENTATION OF CRISIS, SOLIDARITY, AND RESILIENCE IN MAGGIE GEE’S THE RED CHILDREN

Türkçe

This article will situate Maggie Gee’s latest novel The Red Children (2022) within the twenty-first-century literature as a speculative narrative of crisis and resilience. Gee builds her fictional world in the near future by imagining what could happen to the Neanderthals today if they did not become extinct. Despite the fantastic premise of the novel, the fictional near future Gee portrays is ominously familiar to the reader with the devastating effects of a virus outbreak and climate crisis experienced by the characters. The community of surviving Neanderthals, or the Red people as they are called in the story, have to leave their homeland and migrate to the shores of the English town Ramsgate due to global warming. Functioning as an imaginary microcosm for Gee, Ramsgate represents the author’s career-long interest in the condition-of-England novel as well as her awareness of larger social and environmental issues. She reminds the reader that the history of England, like that of the world in general, has always been shaped and transformed by migrations, yet she also explores the tensions and precarious dynamics behind these historical processes affected by environmental crises, neoliberal exploitation, racism, and xenophobia. The gravity of the novel’s subject matter, however, does not translate into a dark, dystopian mode of speculation. This article will examine the innovative and thought-provoking contrast between the content of the novel and Gee’s seemingly simple tone of storytelling. Drawing upon the theoretical delineations of precarity both as a shared existential condition for all living beings and as an unjust distribution of this condition within webs of systemic socio-political and economic inequalities, the article will argue for the potential of this satirical narrative contrast for imagining communal resilience and solidarity against injustices.