The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Sparks fly in engrossing tale
RAIN BIRDS Harriet McKnight
Black Inc, £11.99
APPARENTLY, “cli-fi”, or climate change fiction, is a thing now. Listing Rain Birds in that category, as its publisher has done, gives the impression that it’s a futuristic eco-thriller, though that’s a shade misleading.
The setting for this novel is indeed an overheating present-day Australia, with bush fires posing an increasing danger. But the real focus is on two contrasting women whose stories begin to interact just as an imminent inferno becomes a possibility.
Pina Marinelli lives in the town of Boney Point in a rural region of Victoria. In her mid-fifties, she cares for her husband Alan, who is stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Alan, a couple of years after his initial diagnosis, is a shrunken shadow of the strong, vital man he once was and the strain of looking after him is taking its toll on his wife.
McKnight presents us with a convincing and heartbreaking depiction of Alan’s condition, and of Pina’s plight as she is torn between her sense of responsibility for her spouse and the recognition that the relationship they once shared is over.
Meanwhile, in the nearby bush, a small breeding population of glossy black cockatoos is about to be released into the wild, under the auspices of Sol Petroleum, which is obliged to fund environmental projects to offset the effects of its drilling.
The project is overseen by the troubled Arianna Brandt, who focuses all her energy on her job to shut out the pain of an unhappy childhood dominated by an abusive father who eventually caused her mother to flee with her children. Arianna shows all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and has inherited from her mother the nervous habit of pulling out her hair in clumps. She is tense, edgy, driven and doesn’t relate well to people, unlike her easy-going colleague Tim, whose ability to charm people she resents and envies.
The repopulation programme isn’t going well. The cockatoos need a very specific environment if they are to thrive, but they aren’t settling into the nesting boxes that Arianna and Tim have provided for them. Instead, the birds have discovered that they much prefer hanging out in a grove of casuarina trees on Pina’s property, where they turn out to be one of the few things that can calm Alan’s agitated and often hostile state.
Folklore has it that black cockatoos are supposed to herald rain, but their appearance in Pina’s parched garden foreshadows quite the opposite.
For all that they actually have in common, once the beleagured Pina, who feels that she has quite enough on her shoulders, locks horns with the uncompromising Arianna, who has difficulty accommodating other people’s viewpoints, sparks begin to fly, both figuratively and literally.
It’s an engrossing and well-told novel, but its outstanding strand is McKnight’s depiction of a couple rent asunder by Alzheimer’s, one which brings to the fore not just the strain of being a full-time carer but the sense of loss and grief that follows the end of an intimate relationship.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT