Jane Harper.
Exiles
by Jane Harper
(Pan McMillan, $30)
Reviewed by Greg Fleming
Since her debut, The Dry, just six years ago, Melbourne-based Jane Harper has had a career most writers can only dream of. It's incredible now to think that The Dry was, in essence, the result of a six-week online writing class while Harper worked a day job as a business journalist.
Becoming a bestselling author in her mid-30s, straight out of the gate, inevitably brought questions. Could she follow it up?
The answer was a resounding yes. Harper's three subsequent novels only cemented her reputation as one of the finest crime fiction talents to emerge in the last decade, each expanding and sharpening her themes and execution (my favourite, before finishing this one, her best yet, was 2018's Force of Nature, which involves a group of women on a corporate retreat in Canberra's Giralang Ranges.)
The Dry was made into a (rather middling) film in 2020 starring Eric Bana. Force of Nature, with Bana again, is being filmed now. One imagines that Exiles, set in picturesque South Australian wine country, will also prove irresistible to film-makers.
When we first meet Aaron Falk he's on his way to the christening of his friend's son (his godson). The christening was postponed after the disappearance of a woman at a festival a year earlier. While the woman's 6-week-old daughter is found safe and well in her pram beneath the Ferris wheel, there's no sign of the mother, save for a shoe found at a nearby reservoir.
While Falk had never met the woman, she's the estranged partner of his friend's brother and he was at the festival on the night of her disappearance. A year on the woman's fate remains a mystery and her teenage daughter and loved ones are still searching for answers.
Harper has said that the book, written in lockdown, completes the Falk series. The troubled Australian Federal Police officer who launched Harper's career is a long way from his Melbourne base but gets the send-off he deserves in a beautifully written novel that, again, drills down into a small community and intertwined relationships formed over decades.
Against the backdrop of an annual wine festival with its stalls, rides, Ferris wheels and picnicking families, Harper sets another superb character-centric novel. While delivering a solid mystery narrative Harper also throws light on contemporary Australian society, especially its middle-class culture and customs - the "Exiles" of the title takes on multiple meanings.
Harper gives us at least half a dozen viable suspects in a mystery managed with precision. While she writes of terrible crimes there are few monsters in a Harper thriller; her characters come from a very familiar world - they're your neighbours, your friends, your family, the harried woman sitting in the cafe; ordinary people who have come unstuck, whose troubled past proves inescapable, who, for whatever reason, become hostage to their secrets and we recognise them because there's a little of that in all of us.
As Falk notes early on - "the little things you could have done differently, that was the stuff that haunted you" - and there are plenty of haunted characters here beneath the social niceties and carefully constructed appearances.
If this is your first Harper novel, you're in for quite a treat (the denouement is both heartbreaking and hopeful), you are in the hands of a master storyteller; the good news is once you close the pages on this, there are four other Harper gems waiting.
Award-winning food photographer Christall Lowe shares more than 100 treasured whānau recipes in the gorgeous new cookbook
Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from My Family Table
(Bateman Books, $60). Highlights include mānuka honey muttonbird and pūhā, creamy lemon garlic crayfish and burnt sugar steamed pudding.
Margo and Rosa Flanagan, aka Two Raw Sisters, are back with their third cookbook,
Simple Fancy
(Allen &Unwin, $45), offering a selection of plant-based recipes and menu suggestions to help you celebrate the special occasions in your life.
Miss Polly's Kitchen
(Allen & Unwin, $45) is the delicious result of a Covid project. During the first New Zealand lockdown, Polly Markham began posting her simple, beautiful dishes to Instagram. Once a crew chef on a superyacht, she believes in plenty of flavour and plenty of leftovers.
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis
by Annie Proulx
(4th Estate, $33)
Reviewed by David Herkt
For many thousands of years, a gone world existed completely unsuspected by those Aucklanders heading away for present-day Coromandel holidays. The Hauraki Plains once contained more than 520 square kilometres of green wetlands where mangroves, raupō, and harakeke were dominant species. Dense forests of New Zealand's great swamp-tree, the kahikatea, flourished. It was the habitat of ducks and eels, as well as the spawning grounds for many ocean fish.
Drained in the early 20th century, the Hauraki Plains are now the featureless farmlands that are a monotonous background for children's backseat boredom on the way to a beach-side Christmas.
New Zealand has had an overall 90 per cent loss of wetlands since first European habitation – more than 2.25 million hectares. Proportionally, this is vastly higher than the depredations on the Amazonian river basin that have caused such global outcry. "Worse than former President Bolsonaro's Brazil" is not any recommendation that New Zealanders might pride themselves upon.
In her new book, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis, the American writer Annie Proulx foregrounds the issue. Well-known for her award-winning novels, The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes and the 2016 novel Barkskins, Proulx turns her expert ability with fiction to communicate one of the existential threats that faces humanity.
Wetlands do not have the "glam" quotient that gets instant public attention. They are not cute or cuddly, nor Instagrammably spectacular. Yet, as Proulx explains in her first chapter, they are fascinatingly complex systems that are the basis for much of human life from breathing to fishing, as well as holding sequestered carbon. Their history is dramatic.
As a novelist, Proulx knows how to attract and hold her reader's attention. It is a short but potent book. Fen, Bog and Swamp generally takes Northern Hemisphere wetlands as examples but her logic holds relevance anywhere. Her argument is often contained in the fascinating stories she tells. Proulx does not preach.
For instance, she examines bogs – peat-making wetlands – largely through the lens of the objects and the bodies that have been frequently found in them, preserved by natural processes. With examples that span more than 13,500 years, these include the tall, wooden, carved Shigar Idol, found in Russia, incised with unknown symbols and designs. "Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent authority," Proulx quotes one researcher describing its mysteries.
There are also the various "bog bodies" of Europe, sometimes thousands of years old, perfectly preserved in the peat, from shoes and clothing to facial features and hairstyles. Are they human sacrifices, punishments, disposals of tribal political rivals, or did they serve some unknown purpose?
Proulx neglects one aspect of bogs and swamps – the deliberate preservation of organic material for storage. In New Zealand, when under attack by rival tribes, Māori buried the most valuable wooden carved panels of whare and pātaka for safety and keeping in swamps and peatland. Some of the most thrilling and valuable carved works from pre-European Māori culture have been discovered in swamps.
Fen, Bog and Swamp is discursive, but this is part of its method. Proulx's use of bright examples and wide-ranging sources means the reader absorbs an overview of wetland processes and histories, almost by sleight of hand or osmosis, while moving from one story to another. It is an important book, even more necessary in an era of global warming.
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.