Book Review: "Mobility" by Lydia Kiesling

4/5 stars  

*Spoiler alert!* 

Mobility was one of those books that’s brutally honest and doesn’t let go of that. Featuring a heroine that was complicated and gray, it tells one woman’s story of her upbringing in a diplomatic family in locations around the world and the consequences of her life choices as a privileged white woman on the world around her. Particularly as it concerns the climate crisis. 

“We don’t think in economic cycles, we don’t think in election cycles … in this [oil] industry, we think in earth time. Geologic time. There’s no short-term problem we can’t wait out.”

 

In 1998, Bunny (real name Elizabeth) Glenn is a teenager celebrating Fourth of July with abandon. Her father, a diplomat, is posted in Azerbaijan, where readers get to see the greed at work after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, greed in particular by American and other Western companies looking at snatching up oil resources. Bunny doesn’t know much about the world but can pick up random phrases of the native languages as she moves around the world in her childhood. Her favorite posting was in Athens, Greece, which becomes a particular point of nostalgia through the rest of Mobility.

 

Bunny is one of those characters where I wasn’t sure if I should root for her, especially when she ends up working for Turnbridge Oil Company, in a subsection of the company that is working towards developing renewables, she insists to anyone who asks after her occupation. Her politics are ostensibly liberal, she believes in climate change, but she also enjoys the standard of living that she gets as she moves farther up the ladder from administration to marketing.

 

“There were of course dead people and filth strewn all over the pages of these books. She read about blown wells that burned for months, that incinerated the very air, columns of fire that could be seen from space, celebrity firemen who shut down oil infernos and were played in the movies by John Wayne. The flares, the sour gas, the oceans slicked with crude. Seagulls cleaned off with toothbrushes and Dawn dishwashing soap. Bunny was surprised at how quickly some of these incidents, so consequential at the time, had been disappeared from the pool of generalized knowledge in which she swam. Exxon Valdez, of course she knew that—it was the prototype for malfeasance, the villain of her childhood. Deepwater Horizon, it seemed, would take a similar place in the collective mind. But Texas City? She had driven past it and never known. Piper Alpha? Bohai? Ocean Ranger? Kielland? The tragedy and waste and environmental degradation sobered her. And yet in the accounts found in the Turnbridge reading room these tragedies were made small against the inexorability of a steel tube drilling down thousands of feet, drilling sideways a thousand feet more, seeming to subvert the laws of geology or physics. Literal pipelines laid under the ground and spanning two continents, traveling under the ocean itself, to bring them their standard of living. There was no arguing with it, Bunny felt. Astronauts died going to space, she told herself.” 

Bunny, later exclusively calling herself by her real name in the last half of the book, tries to grapple with the enormity of everything that oil touches in our lives, finding the task impossible. So have I, as I follow the news and read histories, and try to be an informed citizen in very chaotic times. 

“I’m sorry, but this is such an American tragedy! You work for the oil complex so you can have health insurance and a place to live!” 

 

This is the second book in which the term “hyperobject,” some phenomenon of such a massive scale and impact on various parts of our reality that our brains cannot grasp it fully, has come up. I get that the term was only recently coined (if 2010 is considered recent?), but I feel like it won’t be the last time I see it. The oil industry was one and climate change the other.

 

The book’s overall message is how our individual choices have come together to impact the course of the climate crisis, but I can’t help but feel obligated to point out the system itself also shares a big deal of complicity. It’s all a huge mess and changing cultural as well as economic habits is a daunting task. However, I think that we are starting to turn things around in how we think about what it means to have a good life.  

Here’s to the rest of 2024. 

Happy reading! 

--BookOwl