Perth fiction: not just surviving but thriving
Anything could carry disease: a handshake, a coin, a kiss. At least coins and tokens could be boiled.
The first details I heard of Survival, the debut novella of my one-time journalistic colleague Rachel Watts, acted like the most tantalising kind of teaser movie trailer.
First, it was sci-fi, set in a flooded city. Flooded cities are my jam. I've always been captivated by the idea of rowing from roof to roof. Grim real-world cyclones and hurricanes aside, I just freaking love it.
Second, it was young adult sci-fi! I've always believed YA fiction vitally important. The tone and the quality must be perfect if you're going to get through to a teenager. A good young adult book means an exceptional book, period. Some of the most formative books of my entire life, those I regularly revisit, are young adult. Lockie Leonard. The Great Gatenby. John Marsden's Tomorrow series and Ellie Chronicles. Too many to mention, and others whose titles I've long forgotten but whose memories I remember vividly.
So when my advance copy arrived I turned to Survival with anticipation and found only more killer elements.
Post-apocalyptic? Check. Natural disasters? Check. Giant squid? Be still, my beating heart. If there is one sci-fi trope I love above all else it is a kraken. John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes is one of my favourites.
The story is set in a post-climate change world. Governments and economies have collapsed. The Scylla Corporation, the world’s only remaining multinational, rules with an iron fist. Cities are flooded, though people continue to live in them as best they can.
In one such city live two young women. One, a bartender, is living day to day, hand to mouth, grieving the mysterious disappearance of her activist sister.
The other is a number-cruncher who lives in the secure Scylla complex, whose ordered world crumbles the day she finds evidence of something horrifying in Corporation medical research data.
The two, though vastly different, meet by chance and find themselves aligned in their pursuit of the truth.
The book feels a little Children of Men, a little Resident Evil, even a little like the final book in Mervyn Peake's incredible Gormenghast trilogy, the book of the castle sinking into a rising river.
Watts has done her research. Her flooded world is fully and powerfully imagined: the poverty of half-submerged suburbs, the economies that struggle to adapt and stay afloat, and the shining beacon of a ruling corporation that overlooks it all with chilling indifference.
The pictures appear in your mind fully formed: disease-ridden coins, dropped in jars of bleach at market stalls. The filth that rises in the streets when unbearable humidity condenses into torrential rains. The food seller's daughter with both feet amputated after an infection. The fishermen who trade in squid that has become the most plentiful resource in a warped ocean ecosystem. The silent presence of a rumoured giant squid, that bears witness to a clandestine meeting in a stadium that the new world has transformed into a giant fishbowl.
In a state in which our own new tricked-out stadium has just opened, in a country in which action on climate change is at stalemate, this dystopian vision is particularly chilling.
I loved the idea of this book from the start because it had so many of the best hallmarks of a genre I love. But there is no hint of the formulaic here. Watts' streetscapes are completely original and her voice, steely and edgy, is her own.
This debut indicates a promising new voice in Western Australian fiction and happily she's not short of ideas: the bonus content is four of the author’s previously published stories, gems that indicate a fertile imagination. So: watch this space.
Watts' novella is available from tomorrow at Crow Books and other select stockists.
And if Perth fiction is your jam, check out some more new releases: The Sisters' Song by Louise Allan, if you like family sagas and Australian historical fiction; Dustfall by Michelle Johnston if you like your literature with a side of medical thriller; and You Belong Here by Laurie Steed, a beautiful piece of contemporary literary fiction. All in stores now.