Review by Rob Spence
The world of 2026 is a world in turmoil. The relentless 24-hour barrage of news brings daily accounts of war, massacres, invasions, extraordinary political manoeuvres, the suppression of protest, climate disasters, endlessly looping around our always-on culture. In the shorthand of the commentariat, we live in a “time of monsters.” It’s a catchy, all-encompassing phrase, and its uses are obvious to anyone observing the current scene. Its origin, widely quoted, and used by Rebecca Solnit here, is in the Prison Notebooks of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who died after years of imprisonment by the fascist regime in 1937. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” is the translation used by many in the anglophone world. One can immediately see that in the age of Trump, this formula resonates strongly, chiming with the sense of despair and repulsion that is felt by many. The problem is that the striking phrase is not what Gramsci wrote at all. He wrote something more subtle, and rather more complex: “in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid phenomena appear.” To be fair to Solnit, she does acknowledge what Gramsci wrote originally in Italian, but then builds an argument on the idea of monsters, because that’s more pertinent to her purpose here. The reader must, I think, forgive her for this mangling of Gramsci’s phrase, because it is such a powerful metaphor for the current state of the world.
And Solnit’s purpose is really to offer, in these dark times, an optimistic analysis of what might be possible, about what might begin after the end of the time of monsters. In this short but densely argued polemic, she ranges very widely, a deliberate ploy because at the heart of what she describes is the idea of the inter-connectedness of life on earth, what Martin Luther King called “the inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Solnit reviews the ways in which the world, and our perception of it, has changed in the last fifty to a hundred years. One of her touchstones, for instance, is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which, in 1962, first drew attention to the threat to the human and animal worlds posed by the industrial use of pesticides. She highlights some of the successes of the environmental movement since then, and celebrates the movements, large and small, that have effected change in the world. A great example is the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park. This “curbed the elk population and kept it moving, which let the willow, aspen and cottonwood saplings grow by the streams, which provided beaver with material for dams, which created ponds and wetlands, which increased the habitat for fish and songbirds, and benefited the system as a whole.” This remarkable reversal illustrates Solnit’s central thesis, that change for the better emerges from the seeds planted by activists and ordinary people. She demonstrates that the ravages of late capitalism, embodied in such issues as the dominance of big tech, the destructive impact of agribusiness and the curtailing of human rights, can be resisted, and that there can be a rebirth rather than a death. She sees signs of hope in the growing presence of Indigenous peoples and nations in the political discourse, in the widespread appreciation of the natural world, and the enthusiasm for rewilding, in the resistance to the commodification of everyday activity.
As she says in her conclusion:
You can take rights away, but you can’t so easily take ideas away, including people’s belief in their own rights and the rights of people they care about. You can cut down the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.
Reading this book against the backdrop of the ICE offensive in Minnesota gave me some hope for the future. Solnit’s is a powerful and persuasive voice, and one we would all do well to heed.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk
Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Granta, 2026) 978-1803513300, 147pp., hardback.
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