Whatever our misgivings, oil has been driving the world for well over a century. Its multiple derivatives serve our consumption habits and so oil pervades all human relations. For as long as we have been wedded to petroleum and its byproducts, writers have been trying to fictionalise our predicament, through a genre formally identified – back in 1992, by Amitav Ghosh – as “petrofiction”.
Since oil is transnational, pipelines and tankers taking it across the globe, so too is petrofiction. Loaded perforce with large themes, it is also coloured by a distinctive image-repertoire. Petrofiction’s primal scene is “the gusher”: that calamitous moment in the early days of explorative drilling when crude would simply erupt from its high-pressure confinement. “The inside of the Earth seemed to burst out through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagara, and a black column shot up into the air...”, reads a line from the first big petro-novel, Oil! (1927) by Upton Sinclair, a writer who was tirelessly concerned with exposing the material basis of society.
