“The open wilderness of adulthood stretched ahead like so much wasteland,” states the unnamed narrator, a recent university graduate in Sydney and aspiring writer, on page one. Every page seems to have a motif, metaphor, or parallel in this eco-climate-fiction bildungsroman. This red-haired, ironic, vulnerable, and reckless young protagonist spends the searing heat-wave summer of 2013 answering calls at a distress dispatch center, answering, “Emergency police, fire, or ambulance,” making sure to keep her voice neutral and impersonal. She’s the thrice-great granddaughter of John Oxley, an explorer from the 1800s who spent much of his life searching for the mythical inland sea of Australia (millions of years too late—as it had dried up that long ago). That mythical inland sea is now a dry, hot red centre.
The protagonist indulges in blackout drinking, unprotected sex, and hazardous hook ups with an ex- whom she fictionally named Lachlan, like the sea that Oxley traveled. Oxley and his ilk, who “believed in the warm, wet center opening its legs out there is the heart of the dead, dry country,” is a perfect parallel of the male violence to the land during 19th century exploration, and the predatory male that is often accepted now, by women who “ask for it,” as the narrator hears a co-worker spew. There’s a lot of symmetry in this novel that ties the narrator’s body to bodies of land and water. Bodies hot, planet ringed with fire. And everyone/thing defies their parameters.
As she saves up to leave Australia for California, a place she chose “because it is nothing to do with me,” she engages in evermore self-destructive behavior as she recollects key events of her childhood—her father’s drug-addiction, his abuse of her mother, her mother’s heavy drinking, land destruction in the fires of '94, and the protagonist’s current precarious but regulated relationship with her mother now.
Although the climate disasters of 2013 are heady, I was swept away with how Watts drew the portrait of her main character—so intimate and also simultaneously veiled and apart, especially dispossessed of herself. She knew that she was reckless—the bruises on her body from sex, chunks of hair loss from stress, and her emotional state from being with her ex, and yet she tries to treat it all as endurable. Lachlan is an insufferable, indecisive young man, who sleeps beneath a poster of Patrick White. He is also a struggling writer, and holds her back emotionally, as she allows it. Simultaneously restrained and yet lacking boundaries in this endless summer of emergencies, “Emergency police, fire, or ambulance.”
You could write a thesis on this novel, heavy with allusions and paradox, but teeming on every page, I feel, with the narrator’s search for safety in the danger, a strong line not to cross. “My mother could not give me a self-contained narrative. ...In a narrative there would be a clear ending. The scene would fade to black, the curtain would come down, the paragraph would break. ...But our lives contain no line breaks...real life is just sheer bloody continuity.” “The excruciating thing is that time carries on and you love them anyway.”
Watts brilliantly closes in on the theme of bodies and boundaries, both personal and earthly, and the accelerating crisis in both. Male predators, casual misogyny, penetration. We’ve ravaged the land, and climate crisis is raging with disasters; the young woman is calling out soundlessly for help as she watches this unfold. The heat climbs and fires jump their containments. No boundaries, no safety. Hair on fire. A phenomenal novel I could read again and again and get something new out of it every time. I barely touched the surface here.
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