Some Like it Hot – The Windup Girl and Call Me by Your Name

At first glance The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi and Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman have nothing in common. The Windup Girl is a biopunk dystopia where agriculture companies engineer plagues to increase food insecurity as a way to access new markets and promote corporate-back regime changes. Call me by Your Name is a coming-of-age story where a teenager embraces his bisexuality over a summer fling. But they are similar in two major ways. First, they’re both excellent books the deserve your time. Second, they are both hot. Not sexy hot but sunburn hot. Each uses hot weather to accentuate some of the themes found in the novels

The Windup Girl is set in a dystopian future Thailand. Corruption runs rampart and the rising sea is held at bay by failing seawalls and Buddhist prayers. Plagues in crops cause entire villages to be burnt to the ground as a protective measure. Foreign agents in Bangkok are scheming to break Thailand’s food sovereignty and turn the country into another client state for a massive agricultural corporation. On top of all this, everyone is suffering through a brutally hot dry season. It feels like every other page Bacigalupi find a way to mention the temperature. Everyone is sweating, ice is a luxury good, the asphalt shimmers in the heat. This creates a sort of untenable Hell-like atmosphere (augmented by the spirits of the deceased roaming the streets). The Bangkok of The Windup Girl is a pressure cooker ready to explode.

While heat is oppressive and violent in The Windup Girl, it is sensuous, sultry, and celebratory, in Call Me by Your Name. One of the best scenes I’ve ever read is near the end of the novel. Elio joins Oliver for a poetry reading in Rome. It is an extremely hot and humid evening and everyone is crammed into a tiny bookshop. Wine flows, cigarettes are smoked. The bookstore turns into a hot and smoky writhing mass of camaraderie. Elio and Oliver share secret looks while the rest of the party is engrossed in their own discussions. The troupe traipses through a sweltering Roman night getting progressively drunker and louder while Elio and Oliver get progressively drunker and handsier. Their attraction amplified by the heat as sweaty shirts cling to bodies. Their entire evening is hot with weather and sex.

Physical settings are often used as characters. Batman is lesser without Gotham. The Expanse uses outer space as an all consuming malevolent force. Less commonly used is weather. Heat and cold cause people to act differently. Call Me by Your Name could have been set around Christmas without changing the basic plotline but it would have lost much of the sexiness. The plotting and scheming of The Windup Girl didn’t need a searing heatwave but it put all the characters on edge and prepared the reader for an eruption. Well-written stories describe all the angles and weather is as important as any other.