It’s getting harder to see a difference between dystopian and realist fiction. Land of Milk and Honey, Zhang’s second novel after the deservedly Booker-longlisted How Much of These Hills Is Gold, is set in a near future or alternative present in which smog has covered almost the whole planet, ending agriculture and causing global famine and mass extinction. The unnamed 29-year-old narrator is part of “Generation Mayfly”, her life expectancy shortened by pollution, malnutrition and social breakdown. The daughter of a Chinese woman who emigrated to the US, she drops out of medical school to become a chef and is stranded in England when borders close.
Three years later, living on “the mung-protein-soy-algal flour distributed by the government” and cooking “shrinking supplies of frozen fish … reserved for kippers, or grey renditions of cod and chips”, her longing for “arugula, radicchio, the bitter green of endive” becomes overwhelming and she applies – “recklessly, immorally, desperately” – for a job as “private chef for what advertised itself as an elite research community on a minor mountain at the Italian-French border”.
Those three adverbs signal the novel’s serious purpose. Can we ask morality of desperation? Is recklessness immoral? They are urgent questions of this moment: in crisis, what ends justify what means? How far do we forgive collusion with immorality for survival?
The narrator is picked up by private jet, interrogated by Italian immigration officers and again, more thoroughly, by her employer’s private security. She is driven through the night, to altitudes above the smog, but still “rocks scrawled gloomy warnings in the dark” and “what fields I passed were sere and dead”. Yet the restaurant, glass-walled, is full of light – “stunning, transcendent, a white-hot bullet between the eyes” – and the rest of the year she lives bathed in the sunrises, middays and sunsets lost to most of the world. A man who can buy a mountain also has sources of produce, underground storerooms filled with heritage grains, nuts and beans, pickles and freeze-dried fruits, “vast spice grottos”. More disturbingly in the context of mass extinction, the deep freezer holds “chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two … In the circulating air, the extinct revolved on their hooks to greet me.”
But this is not only a book about the excesses of the ultra-rich. The chef’s employer obviously personifies obscene inequality, but he and his charismatic daughter Aida are indeed leading a research community, one productively devoted to longer-term thinking than governments elected by nativist populists can encompass. Aida has led the building of a secret biome in which “every blade, every bush, every flower was a living laboratory engineered to feed someone or something, to take toxins out or put nitrogen back in, all a piece of an intricate ecological puzzle”. Her team have modified grass, “so that it would be capable of sustaining animals through starvation in a pinch”, and created secret habitats for otherwise extinct wild creatures.
The project is a biobank, using investors’ money to create truly sustainable ways of feeding all the plants and animals on Earth, including humans, and it has to be secret and exclusive because if the populist far-right Italian government knew about it they would redistribute the resources to feed a starving populace and “it would be gutted, stripped, in a week”. “They want their mountain back, whatever that means. As if any of them could make use of it as we have.” Again, those inconvenient, insistent questions: how valuable is democracy when voting populations are bent on self-sabotage? Is it justifiable to conceal resources from a state that can’t see further than the next election?
Summer comes, and the ingredients flowing into the kitchen where the narrator cooks for potential investors are “bloodier, fresher”. She learns to seduce the ultra-rich with food, prying “from each diner’s chest the particular soft, wet muscle of their greatest desire, their deepest regret”. She serves a sceptical German financier with “hunks of pig trotter … just the way the grandmother who raised him had served it”. There are “leeks of the crisp, sandy variety grown in the childhood garden of a banker from Andalusia”; haggis for a British sheep heiress. All of them weep and invest. But meanwhile, she herself is dwindling, her appetite lost, weight falling, impersonating a universal mother figure until her collusion with her own erasure becomes dangerous.
This is a rich novel of ideas, insisting on moral complexity in the end times. It’s also a startling prose hymn to food and sex, love and violence, power and resistance. It is not, in the end, devoid of the optimism without which we have no agency for change.
• Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
