Erlend Loe makes humor about the climate crisis: "All tools are allowed"

- I would like to think that I invented a new genre, which could then be called a downfall comedy. So the humor is very important in this story.

It says Jacob Hirdwall who wrote Picnic at the end of the road. A climate dystopia that contains moment-like swarms of human-eating beetles, Kaffa-shaped bureaucracy and upper-class preppers. It may sound fateful and that is it but also quite entertaining.

The biblical climate collapse that scientist Gregor predicts in the novel with advanced calculations, his outside world would rather not know.

- In my story, on the one hand, there is a climate that is about to go down and on the other hand people who are going down in their inability to communicate with each other and relate to each other, says Jacob Hirdwall.

It is precisely our inability to cope with the increasingly concrete traces of the ongoing climate crisis recurs in Animals in Africa written by the Norwegian author Erlend Loe, who made himself known for his low-key and absurd novel art. In the book, five very ordinary people's environmental engagements take on a somewhat unusual expression. With infallible logic, the group decides that the only reasonable way to save the world is to go to Africa and disgrace wildlife, to literally show how we "fuck nature" every day without anyone really caring.

- It is definitely a satire on several levels. Over powerlessness, over the fact that we sort a little in the kitchen, put things in blue and green bags and then fly to New York and eat lots of burgers. Although we know the consequences today, we live the way we want.

There is a lot of talk about climate anxiety today. Do you think humor can be a tool for managing climate anxiety?

- Humor is a way to keep yourself in balance. It helps us, it helps me but it doesn't help the world. In a way, it is a human emergency system, for us to function. But the world gives a damn, it doesn't sense humor or not humor, says Erlend Loe.

- On an individual level, it can be a way to handle something difficult. I heard sound recordings from when Apollo 11 was about to land on the moon, the second time. How they joked in internal communication pretty much at the same time as they knew that everything was at stake. It's a little bit so we work, the humor is also a shelter. Something that can make us alert and focused on our task by taking down the stress so we can think clearly, says Jacob Hirdwall.

But is there a risk that the climate crisis will be joked and become a cheap punchline in the hope of attracting attention, in a literary landscape where climate fiction is taking up ever greater space on the bookshelves?

- No I do not think so. I think all tools are allowed. You have to speak with a regular voice and shout, in my case I speak with a very loud voice and become childish and foolish, unpalatable, I think that is quite liberating, says Erlend Loe.