Warwick

I don't have a particularly good relationship with post-apocalyptic fiction, tending to find it either too far-fetched or, if not far-fetched, too depressing to want to immerse myself in for very long. I was spoiled early by having to read Robert Swindells's relentlessly bleak postnuclear misery-fest Brother in the Land for a school English class, after which I spent much of the next few years lying awake at night worrying that the noise of jumbo jets coming over Gatwick's flight path might in fact be the noise of a nuclear wind rushing towards our house. Thanks Miss Cutler.

Of course it's useful (necessary, even) to be scared by these ideas once or twice – but once you've got to grips with the basic principles, I'm not always sure the lessons learned are worth the emotional trauma involved. Which is what these books try and put you through, because despite the tone of some of my reviews I'm actually not a very critical reader – I tend to be pretty wide-eyed and immersive when it comes to fiction.

More generally, though, I think the genre suffers disproportionately from the prevailing fallacy that tragedy is somehow ‘truer’ than comedy. (Which some critics genuinely believe, not without reason, but which I don't.) This is why for example I am in no great hurry to read The Road, because although I often love Cormac McCarthy's writing style, I think his general philosophy depends on wilfully ignoring huge vistas of human experience and interaction – which is creatively interesting, but when it comes right down to it, no less selective a vision than that of someone like Terry Pratchett.

All of this is my way of saying that I liked Things We Didn't See Coming a lot more than I expected to when a cute sales assistant in a Melbourne branch of Readers flirted me into buying it ‘because the author's a local’. Actually Steven Amsterdam is originally from New York, but Melbourne has been his home for years now: the landscape of this book feels vaguely American, but the language includes some telltale non-US elements (like ‘Mum’). It begins on the eve of the millennium, and disappears off into an alternative present / near-future where society and the environment have broken down.

The book is constructed as a novel-in-short-stories, a format I like anyway and one which works especially well here. In nine standalone chapters, we see our unnamed narrator at different stages in his life, from a ten-year-old boy to a semi-invalid, prematurely-aged wasteland survivor. There is a lot of enjoyable speculation to be had over what must have happened in the long years between chapters, as secondary characters come and go, and as the world around us changes: we see at various times endless rain, urban looting, rural survivalism, drought, plague, even momentary periods of political stability with a decadent ruling class. The prose is sparse, uncomplicated and effective, and a lot of the key developments are unexplained and off-stage.

I like that the geopolitical/environmental speculation is not the main point here. What Amsterdam is really interested in is how interpersonal relationships work, how trust breaks down and whether it can ever be properly built up under extreme circumstances, and how to work out what really matters and strip down your life to just that. There is a nice strain of dark humour running through the book, and although it takes a steady look at the worst aspects of human nature, it doesn't forget the other aspects.

Only one of the stories felt underdeveloped to me; all of them completely held my attention and left me with lots to think about. Recommended for late-night reading under Gatwick flight path.