You’ve probably seen the headline: California Has Australian Problems Now. I asked my friend who works in air quality whether this was really the worst fire season they’ve seen over there and before I even finished the question she was shouting YES into the screen. And then I had another friend text me to ask if I would be his contact on the east coast “for scenarios in which the bay area no longer exists.” I said yes, obviously. And then I kind of walked around staring for a while, both at the hugeness of an ask like that and the unimaginable ferocity of this fire season.
I lived in the Bay Area for a neat decade. Fire season is hell. Choked good mornings through apocalyptic air let in by ancient rattly windows with no weather stripping. Yellow skies, sneezing black, alien gray dust on every surface. Businesses closing or limiting hours, waiting to hear from friends who’d evacuated. How a regular day can bend you to breaking, simply because you can’t breathe the fucking air.
California produces viscous disasters with cold capriciousness. It got into my blood, my stomach lining, my dreams. It’s been two years and I still occasionally sit bolt upright in the night from an earthquake dream. I wasn’t cut out for living there. Because I always felt like California was hunting me.
There’s a writer who I think nails this feeling, and it’s UK-born and Australia-based reporter-cum-novelist and mistress of setting-driven tension Jane Harper.
Her first book is called The Dry, and you should read it now before the Reese Witherspoon-produced Eric Bana vehicle comes out “in the first half of 2021.” But also please know that it’s about drought, and more specifically, the threat of drought-induced wildfires. Looming wildfire sits on your chest throughout the whole book, the knowledge that even the tiniest hint of a spark will set the whole Australian bush ablaze, that it’ll burn faster than anyone could hope to escape it. It drives a kind of cuticle-chewing anxiety that no murder alone ever could, because even the person who is ostensibly on the side of good can, with one wrong move or one millisecond of lapsed attention, cause armageddon in a heartbeat.
There’s a detective driving the story in The Dry, Aaron Falk (who’ll be played by Bana), but don’t let this deter you. And anyway, she only sticks with Falk for two books (Force of Nature being the second of the two Falk novels).
Harper’s third book, and my favorite of hers, The Lost Man, is set in remote nowhere Queensland. A man is found dead in the sand, miles from anywhere, of dehydration. The dead man’s older brother Nathan, living in exile from his neighbors and family due to past sins, is trying to figure out what really happened. Nathan’s pre-murder life is one of boredom, defined by the lonely monotony of trying to carve out a livable existence in a desolate landscape amid so much suffering and alienation. He is never free of the claustrophobia of all that open space. The whole book sings with buzzy stillness, with waiting. With anticipation, as Nathan moves closer to a specter from his past who happens to be his dead brother’s wife. A shimmery, delusional heat and thirst, like a roadway in the middle of nowhere. A slow burn and then a gasp. (And, fwiw, sexy as hell.)
Harper’s newest is called The Survivors, it’s out in February 2021. We’re at a beach town this time, a tiny corner of Tasmania, where Kieran, newly a father, is visiting his parents. The town is the same one where Kieran’s brother died years ago, in a freak accident during a storm. Kieran is already marinating in the guilt and shame of his brother’s death—and the whispers of a town that knows he was responsible—when the body of a visiting art student is found on the beach. The secrets wash up in the waves, and Kieran starts to unravel.
There are two things that I always find in Jane Harper’s books. One is that horrifying stillness. The waiting.
The other is a place. From the wide expanses of Queensland to the isolated beach towns of Tasmania, you can never take your eye off of the landscape because it is coming for you. Whether it’s drought, or heat, or a dizzying infinity of sand, or a tide growing increasingly unpredictable, you’re going to feel trapped with Jane Harper, with the weather and the elements and all the ways you are no match for them. You’re going to live there with her for a little while, a few hundred pages, and when you’re done you’re going to have to climb, physically, out of it. When I finished The Survivors, I was shaking sand out of my shoes. When I finished The Lost Man, I wanted to drink all of the water on the earth.
The only way I’ve been able to stop the constant churn of anxiety about 2020 is to give my brain something exactly as real, exactly as terrifying, to worry about instead. Like when the kitten is chewing on your fingers and you quick pull your hand away at the exact moment you shove a toy in its face. Jane Harper is an expert at tricking the kitten in my brain, and I love her for that.
Donate to Cal Fires and the Monterey County Food Bank, mk? Thanks.
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