Canadian author Liz Johnston pairs the emotional acuity of contemporary fiction with climate-induced desperation in her debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, set to release Apr. 21. Stretching across three decades and the Cascadia bioregion, Johnston examines the fallout from dedication to environmental activism that sends a family into disrepair.
in three parts
The Fall-Down Effect is split into three parts, delineated by time and geography. Readers are first introduced to siblings Sylvia, Fern and River during their childhood in the late 80s. Their mother, Lynn, feels trapped by the demands of motherhood and desperate to return to the action-filled protests of her youth. Soon, Lynn makes the decision to leave her partner, Tom, and dedicate her life to the environmental cause, far away from the small town her family calls home.
Later, teenage Fern is determined to make her own radical stand against the town’s logging industry. Her act of protest, deemed ecoterrorism by the authorities, drives her underground and leaves her parents and siblings deciphering her actions while needing to cover up her absence.
One of The Fall-Down Effect’s standout stylistic choices is Johnston’s decision to write from each family member’s perspective. Consider the novel’s keystone passage, for example, as Lynn reverses out of the family’s driveway—a single page holds five perspectives, five different understandings of what’s happening. While at first glance this approach seems cluttered, it proves effective, giving the reader an opportunity to examine the scaffolding hidden within each character’s choices.
“I had always set out to write the three siblings’ points of view,” Johnston said. Each perspective is an “access point” to the novel. She included the parents’ perspectives later. “I’m sure there’s a version of this book that could have been written with just the children, but I really liked what Lynn and Tom brought to the story, once we were seeing through their eyes.”
Natural Influences
Johnston is located in Toronto but was born and raised in Revelstoke, B.C., which bears a striking resemblance to the place where Sylvia, Fern and River grew up, “but is not that place,” Johnston writes in the book’s acknowledgements.
Still, the dense, old-growth forests of the B.C. interior and coast plainly inspired The Fall-Down Effect. At the time she started writing this book, Johnston “hadn’t been home, back to Revelstoke, in about a decade,” she said. “You just sort of realize the hold a place has on your imagination, and obviously the place you grow up in is going to stay with you.”
The Fall-Down Effect is named after the logging term describing the volume reduction in timber harvested from second-growth trees. Like the forests that Fern and Lynn felt so driven to protect, their family experiences an irreparable fracture, leaving their relationships unable to meet the potential they would have before.
When it came time to write her debut novel, Johnston was well-equipped, mainly due to her time as an editor at the literary journal Brick, from 2012 to 2019. She described that “having that opportunity to learn and understand my own taste, and my own ideas of literary excellence in terms of the kind of work we got,” was responsible for widening her reading. “I think, in turn, [that] makes me a better writer,” Johnston said.
In terms of novels, Johnston’s influences range from family sagas—Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie—to other works of environmental fiction, like Michael Christie’s Greenwood. She also admires The Narwhal’s reporting on forests in B.C. and the 2004 documentary If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. Johnston’s pages are layered with generational love, longing and environmental knowledge.
not quite fiction
Although many works of climate fiction or “cli-fi” arc towards the speculative, Johnston’s is ultra-realistic. For instance, when the town’s logging mill is forced to close, workers and their families must move to find new jobs, impacting the town’s isolated economy and creating friction between friends.
While the protagonists of Johnston’s novel are environmentalists, her understanding for the “other side,” particularly loggers and their families, is something she channeled from her childhood in Revelstoke. Many people Johnston knew from her hometown were, at one time or another, involved in the logging industry. She remembers bumper stickers from that time proclaiming, “Hug a logger…you’ll never go back to the trees!”
Since normal people depend on extractive industries for their livelihoods, the “right” way to pursue environmentalism is not clear-cut. That’s why the environmental movement calls for a “just transition.” A systems-level framework that ensures the path to a net-zero, sustainable economy that won’t leave people behind. Unfortunately, in many countries, that transition is taking place far slower than necessary to mitigate the worst outcomes of our rapidly warming climate. This deficiency of systemic change has led to some activists putting their bodies on the line.
“There’s no one right way” to act or feel, Johnston said, but she agrees that “these are things we should feel rather urgently about.”By illuminating the collapse of natural ecosystems alongside characters’ personal ones, The Fall-Down Effect doesn’t tell readers what path they should take. Johnston simply asks that we weigh the costs and hopefully consider working in community, rather than alone.