The Ministry for the Future

Robinson introduces Ganymed, a 1952 sculpture by Hermann Hubacher, in Chapter 9. Rooted in a myth in which the god Zeus comes in the form of an eagle to kidnap the handsome warrior Ganymede to Mt. Olympus to be his cupbearer (or lover, by some accounts), the statue symbolizes how Mary and others see the relationship between people and nature.

In Chapter 9, Mary points at how the moon seems to lay in Ganymede’s hand, “as if he were about to throw it across the sky” (34), to encourage Badim to do more to help the ministry defend nature on behalf of humanity in the future, what she calls a form of “climate justice” (33-34). For Mary, Ganymed represents the ministry’s potential for doing good. That night is likely the moment when Badim conceives of the Children of Kali, however, so that potential is also violent.

Almost 10 years later, Mary sits under the statue, and this time she is attentive to the eagle toward which Ganymede is gesturing and the swans—“[n]ot creatures of this world at all” (252)—swimming in Lake Zurich near the statue. The swans are creatures of this world, in fact, and when Badim asks Mary about the myth from which the sculpture is derived, she admits she was too fascinated with technology that could help address practical problems than stories like the myth of Ganymede. Mary, despite her position, is alienated from the natural world that the statue represents.

Mary visits the statue years later on two occasions—after Frank dies and during carnival, which she spends with Art. After Frank dies, she looks at the statue and imagines that it is one about:

Ganymede perhaps asking Zeus for a ride to Olympus. It wouldn’t be good when he got there, but he didn’t know that. The gods were godlike, humans never prospered among them. But Ganymede wanted to find out. That moment when you asked life to come through for you (499).

The statue represents Mary’s inability to accept an essential truth about humans as living beings—like all animals in the natural world, they die.

Frank’s interactions with the statue are slight. Frank describes the Ganymede figure as a one that “[holds] his arm up against the distant Alps” (193). Just before his cancer finally becomes apparent, Frank fixates on the gesture Ganymede makes—“enigmatic to the point of blankness”—and concludes that his life is like that, a gesture “[of]ffering something to a great eagle” (394). Frank sees himself as a small person attempting to offer his life to something much bigger—the planet or nature.

Sometime after Frank’s death, Mary takes Art to see the statue. Art helps her imagine the statue as one about humanity’s surrendering to nature, specifically the animals, by protecting it. For Mary, the statue is a reminder that what distinguishes humans from nonhuman animals is that “people can take their fate in their hands. That there is no such thing as fate” (564), meaning that even though humans are mortal, their actions can change the future through intentional actions like protecting the environment.

Robinson uses the statue to reinforce his portrayal of how we can win the battle for climate change on behalf of future generations. The final image of the statue is one that counters the hopelessness and nihilism that many might feel as they see the great amount of work needed to make the future painted in the book a reality.