Review: ‘Birch and Jay’ By Allister Thompson

How do we teach the next generation to value the Earth and its bounty? For Allister Thompson, the author of Birch and Jay, the answer is to tell them a cracking good adventure story about what happens when you don’t.

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Like much contemporary climate fiction, now known as cli fi, Birch and Jay takes place in an explicitly dystopian future Earth. Set in Ontario, Canada in the 2100s, it imagines a world where climate change has continued unchecked. Climate refugees from a collapsed United States have flooded across the border and overwhelmed Canada’s social systems, leading to armed conflict and a massive population die-off. Stable government institutions are only a memory as people in remote villages struggle to survive.

The eponymous protagonists belong to an isolated, idealistic community with a mission: to seek out and preserve knowledge, saving it for a future when humans are worthy to use it. The members take names from nature and are committed vegetarians. Birch, a young woman from the community who is not ordained as a Knowledge Seeker, stays at home while Jay, her childhood sweetheart, sets out on his first “seeking” mission. On the road, he encounters as much danger as he does knowledge, and is helped or hindered by an eclectic cast of older characters. When Birch decides to follow him, she, too, faces both the horrors of this new world while learning from the elders the grim story of how they got there.

Some aspects of Birch and Jay are terrible and dark, and others violent. Its best feature is not the action but the way it leads the protagonists to grapple with big questions. Is an ideals-based community truly the best approach, and is it even sustainable in the face of threats from “The Six”, a group of warlords who have seized control of Great Toronto? What is the responsibility of any individual towards a fellow human? What characteristics in myself should I cultivate? What makes a successful long-term relationship?

The author spends considerable time envisioning and describing, often through the recollections of the older characters, just how a climate-driven collapse might pan out. Some of the description is geophysical but much is political. It often arrives in the form of a lecture – and, indeed, the younger characters demonstrate remarkable patience as their elders orate – but on the whole it is a believable rendering of a post tipping point scenario.

What is less engaging is the shifting timeline of the book. We first meet Jay as an adult instructor in 2173. He is relaying the story of his first mission half a century ago to graduating students in the Knowledge Seeker community in Norbay, who are about to embark on their own missions. Midway through his tale, the action stops and we are sent back to the classroom where an adult Birch appears to tell her story. As such, the reader already knows that everyone makes it and has ended up safe and sound at home. This reduces the stakes of the drama although it might be comforting for younger readers.

Despite this, Birch and Jay is a solid addition to the relatively limited number of cli fi books suitable for teenage or young adult readers. Unlike the absolute collapse of all civilization envisioned in The Comforting Weight of Water, there is room for the characters in Birch and Jay to rebuild and learn for the future. It is obvious at the end of the book that the author has left space for sequels, perhaps focusing on the continued adventures of Birch and Jay, or on other members of the Norbay community. 

There are many lessons in the book just as suitable for today’s adults as they are for tomorrow’s 19-year-olds. As an older Birch tells her students, “Absolute, pure freedom is  a wonderful thing, but it comes with a price.” Jay follows this with an even more poignant exhortation: “Go out into the world full of love, because you are the world … and it’s you.”

Birch and Jay
Allister Thompson
2025, Latitude 46 Publishing, 230pp

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