Entering hostile territory
The lost man of Jane Harper’s third novel is ostensibly Nathan Bright, a divorced cattleman working an unproductive plot of outback Queensland 1500km west of Brisbane; however, most of the male characters could qualify.
When Nathan’s brother’s body is found on an old stockman’s grave and his wellprovisioned car 9km away, the extent of their troubles begins to reveal itself. Again Harper dumps us in a desolate, unforgiving landscape — last year’s Force of Nature involved a group of corporate women adrift in the NSW ranges — but the characters here are born and bred in the Outback, where man is slave to the environment and the women, often, enslaved to the men.
Its vast expanse only serves to bring the plight of the characters into sharper relief. That a man might one day decide to just walk off into the desert because of shame, debt or depression is strangely understandable. Harper observes, “people were either completely fine, or very not”, and for many reasons the Bright family (one senses Harper had fun coming up with that surname) are very much not.
On one level, it’s another Outback whodunnit like Harper’s debut, 2016’s The Dry, but this novel (her first without damaged police agent Aaron Falk) is most memorably a dark family drama. It helps that Harper is an even better storyteller than she was two years ago; there’s none of the melodrama of The Dry’s finale and the plot machinations are sewn seamlessly into the narrative.
And no one writes brooding malevolence like she does.
Though there’s little actual violence on display, the atmosphere is seeped in it: a helicopter landing at sunset is “a black bird against the indigo death throes of the day”; a man sabotages his partner’s car so it’ll break down a couple of hours into her escape, forcing her to radio him to rescue her and the kids; another hides the key to the gun cupboard as he sees a colleague deteriorate.
Harper was born and raised in Manchester and came to Australia as a child before returning to the UK and then, in her 20s, to Australia. Perhaps it’s that distance that enables her to capture the dark recesses of the Australian psyche with such acuity.
I read this with the growing realisation that it was not only another superb thriller but a classic work of fiction by one of the finest novelists now working. Man Booker judges for 2019, are you listening?