Devastating.
LANDFALL by James Bradley may well be the most devastating detective fiction you’ll read this year.
Cataclysmic climate change has transformed Sydney into a ravaged landscape shaped by rising sea levels and cyclonic storms, creating a domestic diaspora, displaced persons in their own country, adding to a population of refugees from other climate affected countries.
“There had been heatwaves before but not like this one; a week of temperatures over 50 degrees. For days socials had been full of images of overflowing hospitals and shrouded bodies piled in refrigerated trucks.”
Amid a cycle of cyclones and conflagration, tempests and temperatures rise as does social division and unrest. Into this maelstrom, a child goes missing and a woman murdered. Senior Detective Sadiya Azad is assigned the initial missing persons case and is drawn into the murder investigation through its likely connection to the disappeared juvenile.
Dealing with her duty as a policewoman, Sadiya is also dealing with her duty as a daughter and the care of her dementia suffering father, Arman.
The cruelty of his affliction affects both father and daughter, Arman’s confused awareness heightening the tragedy: “…suddenly aware of the gap between then and now. Occasionally he would make out the shape of what he had lost, of how he had been more than simply absence and confusion, but when he did it, it was unbearable, an ache of loss for everything he had left behind…the problem wasn’t the forgetting, it was the remembering… the inability to tell what was real, what was imagined.”
What is real and what is imagined become starkly intertwined in the five days of Sadiya’s frantic and frustrating race to find the missing girl before a deadly torrent once again batters and drowns the city.
LANDFALL is a multi layered crime thriller both climatic and climactic, dubbed cli-fi, the fact in the fiction is soberingly frightening, a vision not so splendid of a future fractured by inundation and the ensuing instability of society as we know it. The thin line between civility and anarchy sorely stretched.
Bradley builds the tensions and forebodings like a gathering storm and explores the ultimate destructiveness of humans with the contrasting, perplexing paradox of desperate tenacity, tenderness and hope in the face of total devastation.
LANDFALL by James Bradley is published by Penguin.
