Juice’s introspective side makes it equivocal on this point. Novels written in a similar spirit of condemnation, such as Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House, have cast the exploiters and despoilers as outright villains. In Juice, the bad guys don’t really feature as characters. The focus is on the ethics of resistance and the struggle to retain a sense of humanity in catastrophic circumstances – something the novel links to the responsibilities that come with knowledge.
In the world of Juice, the breakdown of society has swept away most of human history, though fragments of cultural memory survive in the mythologised form of the “sagas” in which it is possible to recognise lines from famous poems, Bible verses and Marx’s dictum “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. The contrast with the incriminating evidence that radicalises the narrator is pointed: the former is a collective expression of humanity, the latter a spur to violent retribution.
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The novel registers its unease here. The narrator’s disempowerment as he becomes disillusioned and his personal life crumbles is also, notably, the point at which the sacramental and the sacrificial reemerge, in the post-human form of angelic “sims”: humanoids, created as slaves for ultrawealthy climate criminals, that have developed a capacity for compassion, loyalty and justice.
Their late appearance suggests the indomitability of a not-exactly-human spirit, though in the wider context of the novel, it seems an ambiguous triumph. Throughout Juice, characters are repeatedly praised for being “staunch”, a word that appears about 500 times. An admirable quality, but cold comfort in a world that has already been reduced to a smouldering ruin.