Jessie Greengrass’s cli-fi novel The High House (2021) is set in a near-future Britain and is chiefly dystopic in its depiction of the effects of Anthropogenic climate change on people and landscape. Set mostly in rural and coastal East Anglia, the story is noticeably devoid of urban spaces, digital technological, social media and the overall speed of modern life. Any yet, despite the rural setting, the novel’s post-apocalyptic narrative distorts any tendency towards easy pastoral associations. As Terry Gifford tells us, the long pastoral tradition is based on the paradigm of Theocritus Idylls, as “a vision of simplicity of life in contact with nature” (16). This heavily idealised representation of life in the country has been central to the Western literary tradition yet has changed dramatically in the early modern era. This paper will show how Greengrass employs traditional features of pastoral, such as a simpler, slower bucolic life, nostalgia, and a life lived in harmony with the seasons, together with more modern forms of the genre such as anti-pastoral or the harsh realities of rural life to present a form of pastoral disfigured by climate change. In addition, this paper will argue that The High House relies on elements of slowness related to Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” (2) Ultimately, this paper argues that the conflation of rural slowness - a staple feature of the pastoral tradition - with the slow violence of climate change are central to the novel’s dystopic nature.