Narrator Theo Cannon introduces this story from a point in the future when "There is no future". It's clearly mankind's fault, but if, as the adult Theo feels, there's a lesson to be drawn from his recollections, it seems a bit late now.
Still, we join the 13-year-old Theo as he is being driven to the Shropshire estate of his grandparents, Rosemary and Leonard. Rosemary is dying and has summoned her three middle-aged children and their offspring to select the furniture that will be their inheritance.
Tim Pears once said there are two subjects for fiction: family and war. The Cannons are a family at war. But it's a terribly Radio 4 sort of war, waged over Scrabble and tea.
There are moments of affecting detail - as when Theo registers the labels on his grandmother's homemade jams: "None were from this year. We were already living on her reserve supplies, just as she was."
But even here the language, with its nod to energy consumption, betrays the eco-fable that Pears is determined to make this. In doing so he reduces an already slight story to a rickety trojan horse for a moral that purports, with some grandeur, to explain, "Why we failed," but doesn't.
