The year is 2064 and Europe has been rent asunder by political divisions and cataclysmic climate change. Air travel and global telecommunications networks are long gone, and borders have been reinscribed across the continent. We meet Petrel Dimech, travelling around Europe with his grandmother, Rika. When she dies in a traffic accident, Petrel, suddenly alone, seeking answers to questions he can barely articulate, decides to travel to Malta - the homeland she always spoke of, but which he had never been to himself. 

Petrel finds a country left in ruins by destructive storms and rising sea levels. Much of the population has left, seeking passage to safer shores and begging for work permits to be allowed to resettle and build a new life elsewhere. Those who remain live at the mercy of an Italian military occupation using the island for their own secret purposes.

 

So begins Rokit, Loranne Vella's latest novel. Rokit follows her work on Il-Fiddien, the fantasy trilogy co-written with Simon Bartolo, and Magna Mater, her first solo novel and her initial foray into the science-fiction genre. Rokit is being touted as her first novel for adults, and, much as the distinction between "young adult" fiction and fiction "for adults" is an artificial one, there's no denying that new stylistic and thematic ambitions are on display here.

 

Rokit is many things: a work of apocalyptic sci-fi addressing contemporary concerns regarding climate change and the decline of the post-war liberal world order, a thriller of guerrilla warfare and underground resistance, a family drama spanning several generations, concerned with the relationships between grandparents, parents and children, and a philosophical meditation on time, the medium of photography and the nature of political revolution. It strives to be personal and political, general and specific, concrete and visionary.

 

Sometimes, the pieces don't quite gel - most notably, in the novel's midsection, which draws the focus inwards onto Petrel's son Benjamin during his years in the underground resistance to the military occupation of the island. Here, the gritty practicalities of tactical and political machinations jar with the abstract and conceptual digressions into the formal theory of photography and perception. By and large, however, the novel's various facets come together in a rich kaleidoscopic vision. As each new section unfolds, shifting between protagonists, milieus and decades, the preceding section is put into perspective, taking its place in a greater whole that is only fully glimpsed as the novel draws to a close.

 

 

Vella's novel wears its influences proudly. It owes an acknowledged debt to Chris Marker's sci-fi film La Jetée and its remake as Twelve Monkeys. It also brings to mind a range of wintry post-apocalyptic sci-fi tales of environmental collapse and political oppression - I was reminded of Lob, Legrand and Rochette's graphic novel La Transperceneige and its cinematic adaptation, Snowpiercer - as well as an assortment of elements from various other sci-fi tales, notably Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife.

Rokit hews so closely to some of these influences that it might be accused of being derivative. However, the ace up Vella's sleeve is the way in which these familiar genre tropes are made to resonate with the specificity of the Maltese context. On a personal level, Petrel and Benjamin's story, with its focus on arrivals and departures, on being drawn back to Malta, or feeling oneself flung away from it, or wanting to leave but being unable to, speak to the experiences of many in the increasingly far-flung Maltese diaspora. On a more general level, as with Magna Mater, much of the novel's power comes from the uncanny thrill of encountering familiar locations made strange. The story largely takes place in Żebbuġ once all the street-lights have gone out and the parish church lies in ruins. The people that are left shelter in boarded-up houses from endless downpours and biting dust storms, and the de facto centre of the fractured community is the Kċina (Kitchen) - a rationing station, but also a meeting point for sharing news from the outside world and secretly plotting resistance to the occupying regime.

 

There are clear historical echoes being sounded out here, and this is not a book that leaves such things unsaid. Sometimes, that's to a fault: when Petrel lands in Malta for the first time and is driven through the ruined streets of Mellieħa, we don't need to be told that the sight makes him think, Ozymandias-like, of the impermanence of humanity's works. Likewise, when we are first introduced to the Kċina, and to the network of underground tunnels in which the remnants of the Maltese population take refuge from the harsh weather and the oppression of the occupying forces, the historical echoes of the Victory Kitchens and the air-raid shelters of WWII grow less, rather than more, affecting, through being spelled out at length.

 

Vella might, perhaps, be charged with overstating her themes, leaving little on the level of subtext. Having said that, there is no denying the affecting power of the resonances she achieves by building a dystopian vision using, as her raw material, the horrors of war and colonialism lingering so close to the surface of our national historical memory that many of us have heard them recounted by our grandparents.

 

In doing so, Rokit offers a response to a cultural moment in which many of us sense a drawing-back of the social and political progress we had taken for granted. Taking up a theme of circularity and repetition, it suggests a closed circuit between the horrors of the past, present and future - those that linger in our national memory, those that lurk beneath the headlines of today's world news, and those imagined in the dystopian visions of science fiction. Within this circle, Vella manages to find her way towards a note of hope.