Sunday book review – Our House is on Fire by Malena and Beata Ernman and Svante and Greta Thunberg

I feel privileged to have read this book a few days before it is released. You should read it too.

I don’t normally do this, but here is the publisher’s account of the book; rather unusually it sums up the book accurately:

This is the story of a family led to confront a crisis they had never foreseen. Of a happy life with two young daughters which suddenly falters, never to be the same again. Aged eleven, the eldest stops eating and speaking, and her younger sister struggles to cope. Slowly, alongside diagnoses of autism and selective mutism, their desperate parents become aware of another source for their firstborn daughter’s distress: her imperilled future on a rapidly heating planet.

Steered by her determination to understand the truth, the family begins to see the deep connections between their own and the planet’s suffering. Against forces that try to silence them, disparaging them for being different, they discover ways to strengthen, heal, and act in the world. And then, one day, fifteen-year-old Greta decides to go on strike.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/315/315194/our-house-is-on-fire/9780241446737.html

It doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs does it? But it is an utterly compelling read. The book appears, essentially to have been written by Malena Ernman, the mother of the tale, who was an opera singer (a good one) and sang Sweden’s Eurovision entry in 2009.

But it’s a harrowing tale of a family that struggles to cope with a great range of issues – some internal to the family but others shared by us all. You have to wonder quite how it is that some can care so deeply when others appear not to care at all.

So, no, it’s not a bundle of laughs but it is not depressing either – it made me angrier, rather than sadder. That’s partly because we know some of the story and many of us have come to admire, in an overawed way, the young Greta. We can see her as a force for good in the world, even though she seems a more than slightly scary character. Two days ago the 16 year-old Greta was on College Green in Bristol. I walked across College Green several times a while ago when I was 16, I hadn’t addressed the United Nations or been rudely slagged off by the President of the United States and I had hardly missed a day of school let alone started a school strike that spread across the world.

I think that this book will move you because it is a very human story of four people, but whatever your current position on climate change, I think it will nudge you into stronger belief and further action. I hope so.

The book is ordered chronologically in 108 scenes. When I got to the day of Greta’s school strike, Scene 92, I was just willing her to succeed and for it to go well – even though I knew that it must have gone pretty well as it led on to the Greta Thunberg we read about and see on TV. That single act by a teenage girl was a redemptive moment for the family – everything changed that day. One feels that it was an important day for the planet too.

Please read this book, and then pass it on.

Our House is on Fire: scenes of a family and a planet in crisis by Malena and Beata Ernman and Svanta and Greta Thunberg is published by Allen Lane. Profits to the authors go to a foundation which will donate to Greenpeace, WWF and other non-profits. The book is released on 5 March.

Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.

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