Eleutheria by Allegro Hyde

Published by Knopf Doubleday/Vintage on March 8, 2022

Eleutheria is a near-future or alternative-present novel about a wannabe activist who joins a community that plans to counter rising environmental damage. The eco-crisis has coincided with (or been accelerated by) authoritarian rule across the US and Europe and with ethnocentric isolationism that caused Scandanavian countries to seal their borders and withdraw from the EU.

The story envisions a watershed political change based on a utopian society that, like other fictional utopias, is populated by a small and nondiverse group of like-minded individuals. Successful small-scale utopias tend to go off track when they try to replicate their success in a larger community of people who have sharply different political opinions. That reality is one that Eleutheria never satisfactorily confronts. Nor is it clear why pragmatic solutions to climate change (alternative energy sources, biofuel, and making shoes from plastic harvested from the ocean) need to be showcased on a Carribean island to gain widespread acceptance.

Willa Marks begins her idealistic journey of environmental activism by reading an unpublished manuscript that she’s not supposed to have. The author of Living the Solution, Roy Adams, advocates setting aside all personal pleasures and goals for the sake of absolute devotion to the cause of saving the environment. Inspired by Adams, Willa travels to Eleutheria, an island in the Bahamas, where Adams’ crewmembers have established an eco-friendly community called Camp Hope in the expectation of launching an eco-conscious project that will change the world. The details of the project are vague, as is Willa.

Since Willa was not invited to Eleutheria, she is not welcomed by Adams’ crew of ecowarriors until she gains Adams’ acceptance. That apparently happens after Willa suffers sunstroke while paddling around in the sea as she searches for Adams. Perhaps Adams decides to accept Willa because she is plucky. More likely, he accepts her because she worships him as a visionary. Nobody seems to notice that, as idealistic visionaries go, Adams seems a bit shady, although that will be obvious to the reader.

As Willa goes back and forth about her commitment to the cause, Adams adds new recruits in the form of rebellious teen offspring of wealthy parents. The story eventually takes an unexpected but welcome turn before reaching a bizarre and unbelievable climax.

Willa’s backstory portrays her as a young woman raised by drug addled survivalist parents in their self-inflicted cocoon of fear of outside world. Willa made terrariums that serve as a symbol for her youthful interest in protecting the environment, although they also seem to be symbolic of her need to protect herself. Willa later stayed with cousins who photographed her in designer clothes, hiding the price tags so they could return the clothing. That’s apparently symbolic of consumerism. Willa educated herself by sneaking into lectures at Harvard while hanging out with self-styled radicals called Freegans who regarded shoplifting as social activism. With little evidence, the Freegans adopted the belief that it only takes 3% of the world’s population to effect massive cultural change, a belief that Willa accepts as a verity before she begins her eco-adventure.

Willa began to hang out with Sylvia, a Harvard lecturer who became Willa’s first lover. How Sylvia came to possess the copy of Living the Solution that changed Willa’s life is a question that Willa does not ponder until late in the novel. While the truth is no doubt intended as a shocking reveal, it limps into the story as an anticlimax. A clash between Sylvia’s sophisticated political views and Willa’s naïve idealism fuels the novel’s relationship drama.

Eleutheria isn’t a long novel, but it feels padded. At one point, Allegra Hyde lists various things that can turn into projectiles in a storm. At another, she reproduces bits of climate change trivia that Adams’ crew members write down on pieces of construction paper. Occasional passages that describe the history and colonization of Eleutheria add nothing to the story. The plot too often bogs down when a good trimming of the word count would have produced a tighter, more evenly paced novel.

Hyde’s prose is often keen, but some of her images fail to make their intended impact. “Fear is a slimy sensation; it oozes into your limbs like a chilled eel.” How, exactly, does an eel get into your limbs? And what is the difference between a chilled and an unchilled eel, apart from the need to refrigerate eels that will eventually be used in sushi?

I had difficulty taking Eleutheria seriously, in part because it isn’t clear to me what point Hyde intended to make. Social activists can be silly and irrelevant and easily manipulated? True, but serious activists balance their idealism with a perceptive sense of the achievable. World governments show a trend toward redefining activism as leftist terrorism? Yeah, but the novel’s focus is not on the dystopian consequences of authoritarian rule. Self-styled visionaries often turn out to be frauds? Well duh. People are imperfect? Double duh, although that one seems to come as a revelation to Willa.

Hyde chose easy targets, from survivalists to gullible idealists, but exposing the obvious does too little to enlighten. Still, I appreciate Willa’s sentiment that “without a vision of a better world, it was despair all the way down.” John Lennon’s “Imagine” made that argument more simply and poignantly than Eleutheria.

The novel does make a couple of salient points, beyond the obvious truth that climate change, left unchecked, will eventually destroy most human life. One point is that the corporate elite won’t acknowledge the problem until the financial ruin caused by climate change exceeds the financial gain of running businesses that are based on carbon emissions. Another is that corporate media are great at reporting disasters — events that last a single news cycle — and not so great at reporting solutions that need to be explained and reexplained before they seep into the public consciousness. Despite its glimpses of thoughtful storytelling, the story is too muddled to serve as an effective cautionary tale and too detached to work as engaging fiction.

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