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My introduction to the fiction of Scottish author Jenni Fagan is The Sunlight Pilgrims. Published in 2016, this is a novel I moved up my reading docket based on positive reviews, its apocalyptic trappings and my winter theme to read fiction set in freezing environments. While I'm usually avid for new takes on doomsday and a new Ice Age grabbed my attention, I was not compelled by anything Fagan attempted to do or how she went about it. Had this novel been a door stopper, I would've abandoned and pinned a one-star rating on it, but then again, if it had been a door stopper, it would've forced Fagan to put more meat on the burger.

In November 2020, the melting of the polar ice caps has dumped freshwater into the salinity of the oceans, wrecking havoc with the North Atlantic Drift and ushering in a new Ice Age. Temperatures in London have dropped to -6 degrees and are expected to plummet further in the winter. Economic collapse has killed off commerce, with Dylan MacRae forced to surrender his family owned movie theater the Babylon to the bank. With both his grandmother Gunn and mother Vivienne dying recently and Dylan no longer able to live in the theater, he discovers that his mum purchased a caravan off the books and left it for him.

With Britons fleeing south, Dylan takes the bus north, to a caravan park in the Scottish village of Clachan Fells. Among his possessions are the ashes of his beloved grandmother and mother and his gin-making equipment. Trading freezing weather in London for arctic conditions in the caravan park, he befriends a survivalist single mother named Constance Fairbairn and her twelve-year-old Goth daughter Stella, who is one year into her transition from male to female. Dylan finds difficulty adapting to life without his family, while Stella comes to terms with her sexual identity and being treated as a pariah by the community.

Outside there is a blue, blue sky and frost has dusted the Clachan Fells mountains silver. Stells Fairbairn feels like she is going to cry, and nobody is even up yet. She is a swan wrapped in cellophane and everyone can see through her skin. Lewis will never kiss her again. She might as well forget it. She isn't pretty, and she's angular, and she has a penis. As tick boxes go for the most popular boy in school, those attributes are probably not high on his list. He did kiss her, though, and the only two people that know about it are her and him. He won't kiss her again in case any of his friends find out and think he's weird--that is why he won't do it again. Or because he already knows he'd like it. He wants to, though. He wants to even more than she does. That feeling. A light flutter in her chest. It squeezes in. Her ribs are embracing each other. The light outside is so bright now it almost feels sinister. Clenching her teeth. Hoping someone will want her one day. If Lewis tries to kiss her again she'll shoot him down, because he's too ashamed to do it in public. Lately, fear is following her. It is two tiny pit-a-pat feet always skittering behind her. When she turns there is nothing there, just the faintest footprints in the snow.

Buyer beware: The Sunlight Pilgrims takes a strong turn toward literary fiction and away from science fiction. A major shortcoming of the novel is its failure to explore its conceit. How would Britons prepare for an Ice Age? How would a city dweller survive? How would a caravan park come together, or not come together? Fagan isn't interested and could've easily set her story in a rugged environment, like The Shipping News, without dressing her story in science fiction clothes that don't fit. As if Cormac McCarthy were a major influence in her MFA study, Fagan also refuses to use quotation marks, and her dialogue is very precocious.

The light outside grows brighter. Stella passes down the muted YouTube clip to her mum on the bunk below and Constance watches it for a minute.

--Gender is closer than anyone likes to think. Men won't buy it because most of them are dickheads, she says.

--Is that the technical term. Mum?

--It is. We all share twenty-two identical chromosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyone starts out female and they stay like that for months.

--What, even Dad?

--Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.

--Mum! Can't you say penis?

--It sounds so sterile.

--Why don't they teach this stuff in Sex Ed?

--Gender indoctrination. It's state imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it--the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and a vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.

--So, it's like a vagina line?

--It's totally a vagina line.

--Fucking hell!

--Swear jar, Stella. There's plenty male-and-females in one: snails, echinoderms; a cushion sea star spends its first three years female, then three years male. There's twenty-one species of fish on the spectrum: angel fish, sea bass, snook, clown fish, wrasse--a female wrasse turns into a male if the dominant male dies. The prettiest is a butterfly, where the male side has big black wings and the female side has smaller purple wings. It's a bilateral gynandromorph, male and female in one.

--You should go back to teaching, Mum.

--Fuck that! Kids are annoying little bastards, present company excluded.

--Swear jar!

Good hell. In addition to dialogue, I don't think Fagan writes men believably, with Dylan spending less time adapting and overcoming the numerous challenges of his environment and more time dwelling on the loss of his grandmother and mother. There's room in apocalyptic fiction to explore the inner world of a survivor; few apocalyptic novels do this as well as The Dog Stars and it's even touched on in the Mad Max pictures. The Sunlight Pilgrims doesn't meet the minimum expectations of its genre, doesn't introduce characters who are relatable and doesn't provide readable dialogue. It's a major disappointment.

Length: 78,138 words