The Carol Shields Prize, 2024: The Future

Not to be confused with the other Future that came out recently.

In an alternate future, Fort Détroit was never surrendered by the French. Gloria comes to the city after her daughter dies and her two teen granddaughters disappear. As she tries to work out what happened to her family, she becomes integrated into the community built by the local adults, who grow their own food and provide medical care and emotional support to each other. But a parallel community has been constructed by the children living in the wild forest of Parc Rouge and on the banks of the river Rouge. The children’s world is harsh – any betrayal of information to adults is punished by exile, and members of the group are automatically banished after reaching puberty. But it’s also a world marked by co-operation, caring and ingenuity, as the kids sabotage machines set to pull down Détroit landmarks, and organise raids on local greenhouses for fruit.

Catherine Leroux’s The Future, translated from L’avenir, its French original, by Susan Ouriou, is beautifully hallucinatory, but also has some very real-world things to say about how we care for each other across generations. Interestingly, Leroux has stated that one of the major reasons she set this book in an alternate, Francophone Détroit is because ‘I wanted to be able to write dialogue that felt closer to the dialects and the French that I hear around me. And if I’m writing about English characters, but I’m writing their dialogue into French, then it can’t really take that shape’.  This rings true to me: alternate Détroit didn’t feel like it played a major role in the story, apart from the occasional awkward history-dump, but the language is gorgeously colloquial, so props to Ouriou for preserving that in the English translation. I loved how Leroux moves seamlessly between her characters’ heads, and I think she’s also managed to write the only dog point-of-view that I didn’t find hopelessly sentimental.

I’m always drawn to stories where children create their own worlds, but they tend either to assume feral chaos (Lord of the Flies), calculated horror (‘Children of the Corn’) or make the kids sad victims of circumstance who just need an adult to take charge. Leroux’s take is so much more nuanced. At first, we think these children’s communities are a short-lived thing born of trauma and displacement, but it turns out they have a much longer history in the Parc Rouge. The kids have their own way of understanding their changing environment, which, as with the indigenous Peruvian community in Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, is not ‘scientific’, but is none the less logical. There’s a touch of magical realism in The Future, but it’s possible that this is also just the children’s way of interpreting the strange things that are happening around them. I loved that the adults end up offering help to the children without taking away their autonomy, and that the focus is on a wider network of family relationships, including grandmother-granddaughters, rather than on the nuclear family unit.

I had a few issues with The Future: the first section, which focuses solely on the adults, is very slow, as the children are really the motor of the story, and this delayed introduction also meant that it took me a long while to tell many of the child characters apart. But these are minor quibbles. This is a thoughtful and wonderfully atmospheric book, a far better version of Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible, and I’m so glad to see it on the Carol Shields longlist.

I read this as a buddy read with Bookish Beck. Rebecca’s review is here. Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories for sourcing a free e-ARC from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number six. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot and Brotherless Night.