No One Is Saved Alone
The Devil’s Highway (2018) by Gregory Norminton
Cassandra of Troy, the mythical prophetess cursed to be right about the future but never believed, could describe how her city would burn after Odysseus’ clever ruse. But even she escaped the intimate terror of experiencing the collapse from the perspective of multiple characters. Cardiff University researcher Aaron Thierry’s recent PhD thesis, “Cassandra’s Children”, studied the reactions of climate scientists to their Cassandra experience – the unheeded warning, and what that does to the warner. The psychic toll it takes on actual people is not done justice by myths, if Thierry is to be believed.
Reframing stories of climate disaster from a Homeric mythology to a form that puts you right inside the interiority of recognisable characters caught up in it seemed to have defeated literary fiction. Or so Amitav Ghosh wrote in The Great Derangement (2016). Though perhaps reading more Octavia Butler might have cured him of that thought.
Since 2016, several novelists have explicitly taken on Ghosh’s challenge. Some, like Los Angeles-based Stephen Markley, found themselves frantically redrafting as their carefully-researched climate disasters set decades in the future as they happened in real time, forced only by deadline to stop editing his 2023 The Deluge.
Greg Norminton’s The Devil’s Highway offers a time-lapse picture of England’s landscape: three exposures of the same place across three thousand years. Bagshot Heath in now-Surrey appears first as Romano-Celt Andagin’s living country, then as a damaged remnant on London’s contemporary fringe, and finally as the “Heave”, a desert crossed by feral post-literate young adult survivors fleeing slavers and drought. The Roman road survives throughout. England itself does not.
This makes Norminton’s novel less a triptych than a descent into drought, of water and mind. Land knowledge steadily drains from the place and its successive cultures. Andagin reads animals, weather and woodland as a field of reciprocal obligations. His Roman occupiers see the same space as something to tame. In the present, Robbie’s archaeological devotion to the heath is already nostalgic: London is visible in the distance, advancing upon England, while pollution, traffic and casual vandalism degrade what remains. The war-traumatised Aitch reads landscape as territory in which wounds can be displaced onto others.
By the future timeline, place has ceased to sustain memory or settlement. The feral young adults know ruins without knowing what ruined them. Their broken English – the audiobook version, partly voiced by the author, does the best justice to that part of the book – compresses history into names. Bagshot becomes “Bad Shot”. Our era the “Fast Times”. We hear how the diminished landscape has diminished their character. They scan the Heave for water, food, shelter and enemy pursuit. Climate collapse is not a luxury belief; it is a reality to be endured. Norminton’s parched England produces lives nasty, brutish, and short – the equal to any in the worst Hobbesian nightmare.
The Given World, set in a plausible but fictional town in a fictional Wessex valley, offers a wetter, more compressed in time, contrast, in exploration of the same themes. Lower Eodham experiences climate derangement in slow motion and parable: seasons lose their metronome, plants fail, animals depart, drought gives way to the River Welm rising in flood.
Yet Harrison’s valley remains governed by cycles, however violently altered. Water returns to holy springs and even runs over the flagstones of the old priory that now serves as a protagonist’s house; floods destroy, but can also renew. Life is wounded and uncanny rather than finally snuffed out.
The contrast sharpens Norminton’s bleakness. With Harrison, the human tragedies are borne within a more-than-human world still capable of resurgence. Human continuity is doubtful, but life retains agency.
In The Devil’s Highway, the Roman road endures because the ecology around it does not. The monument outlives the assumptions that built it.
Both books are haunted by London. Norminton gives us the metropolis first as a distant encroachment and later like the shark in Jaws: an offstage threat of disease and lost power from which the future children move west.
Harrison’s London is less apocalyptic but gravitational. Lower Eodham is partly populated by people who have left the city, seeking an idyll whose seeming permanence the novel starts to dismantle. But flight from London is conscious only up to a point. Characters believe they are escaping noise, failure, danger or an old life. The reality, the novels suggest, is that they are responding to a civilisational pressure they cannot name.
Here both British novels meet Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Lauren Olamina begins in a walled community on the edge of Los Angeles: an idealised (for post-collapse times) enclave whose security depends upon pretending that the metropolis outside has not already collapsed. Fire and encroaching marauders break the illusion and turn the novel northward. Butler makes plain what Norminton and Harrison leave implied. We are, in the end, all destined to be put on the road by what is to come. But we mostly lack a grammar, a syntax, a language, to describe that before it actually happens.
That language is spiritual. Butler’s “Earthseed” declares God to be Change. Harrison places “Loyalty to the given world” at her novel’s heart and lets springs, omens, floods and departing local gods disturb the border between the natural world and the sacred. Norminton passes a carved flint through deep time, as gift, talisman and mystery. This may be the most believable of the three.
None of the three offers a Deus-ex-Machina rescue, though each may offer clues of how to navigate in its absence. The offer is not that we will be saved by walls, roads or ownership. Only to receive change without surrendering responsibility.
Norminton’s, the bleakest by far, stubbornly offers the most raw of all possible redemptive endings, as some characters choose to save another to whom they have no real obligation: none of us is saved alone.
Copyright 2026 Richard Delevan wickedproblems.earth
Shar pei with opposable thumbs. Climate tech in the streets, crime fiction in the sheets. Around since 327 ppm. Writer, podcaster, strategist. GreenSky, EnergySky. MAGA delenda est. Pronouns: y’all/yer man
@richard.wickedproblems.earth