Murky Effects

THE FIRST PAGE attends to “murky effects.” A man and woman trudge along Southwark Bridge under “a dark yellow sky—like iodine—and brownish clouds, mounted in flat, extravagant, painterly puffs.” It is a literary fog: a cousin to Charles Dickens’s smoky “London particular” and the meteorological considerations in Middlemarch (1872) that hint at mental weather. In Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House (2026), the sky is hurricane-whipped from Saharan sand, from drifting fire ash in Spain and Portugal. Laura walks oblivious. “Well, it’s a storm now,” says Putnam. The winds of chance, a quotidian disturbance.