The Sea and Summer

Author
George Turner
Publisher
Orion Books
Year
1987
Collection
Fiction
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George Turner’s The Sea and Summer takes place in a near future Australia, where the greenhouse effect has led to eternal summers and encroaching sea level. The inhabitants have been split into two castes: the well-off ten percent are known as Sweet while the wretched ninety percent are known as Swill. The Sweet live precariously in middle-class suburbs, never knowing if their luck will continue; while the Swill are jammed into enormous, barely maintained high rises that flood with sewage at the whiff of rain. The book closely follows the paths of two Sweet children who drop to the fringe of Swill territory when their father loses his job and commits suicide. Climate change is an obvious theme, but I found the book more interesting for its treatment of the caste system, which, sadly, is as relevant to present-day capitalism as to this darkly imagined future.

Reading notes

The sweet and the swill

In The Sea and Summer, Melbourne of the mid-twenty-first century is half buried under the rising sea. A strict caste system is in operation: about a tenth of the population are “Sweet,” people with with jobs and homes on dry land, money enough to buy clothes and food as they need. Everyone else is “Swill,” rendered jobless by automation, packed into overcrowded high rises that flood at high tide and become prisons (or graves) in a storm.

The story follows one family who drop from the Sweet into the Swill and must adapt to their new circumstances. One among them remarks that,

The Sweet had to believe in their superiority or admit that they tore their possessions from the fingers of the Swill.

Turner, The Sea and Summer, page 78

Which of course is as plain a statement of the present day as any.

It occurs to me that in the US at least, we have both an explicit gospel of prosperity (and the grift that accompanies it) and many implicit ones—in the form of assertions both plain and subtle about which people deserve lavish salaries and perks and which do not. But I wonder if the latter is starting to crack a little, after years of layoffs and coercive RTO plans and lustful proclamations from investors about a future where machines do the work of engineers. Perhaps our presence among the Sweet isn’t so assured, after all. In which case, Turner’s storytelling may be instructive: in the book, the Sweet think only of themselves, while the Swill take care of each other.