The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall
(Simon & Schuster, $37.99)
Australian novelist Kate Mildenhall proves once again she’s highly adept at writing about the world to come. In her new novel, the author of the near-future The Mother Fault delivers a stark warning about what might be ahead if climate change and humankind’s greed go unchecked.
The Hummingbird Effect is set in four periods following the lives of four women living in 1933, 2020, 2031 and 2181. In each case, they are witnessing progress they are fearful of. Interspersed in their stories is the “Hummingbird Project”, a series of eerie and at times impossible-to-answer Q&As between a character, ErisX, and an AI chatbot, asking big questions such as what human innovations it would undo if that were possible.
Mildenhall moves back and forth between each woman’s story: 19-year-old Peggy in 1933, whose employment revolves around the meatworks in Melbourne’s Footscray, which is facing technological change, and her early marriage after becoming pregnant to a violent man. We then jump to 2020 and elderly Hilda, once an eminent scientist, who’s locked down in her rest home during Covid, out of contact with family and worrying about losing her faculties. In the near future of 2031, La (Lara) lives with her partner Cat in a deteriorating Footscray. La is an out-of-work voice artist for AI and toying with activism against her Amazon-type employer, WANT. She struggles with some serious moral questions when she goes through an egg harvesting programme, which is part of WANT’s wellness package. Perhaps most intriguing is the life of Maz and her sister Onyx in 2181, who are living in a small community on the coast. They are Stewards, looking for remnants of life before, living in caves because of the heat, and led by a tough cult-like leader, JP. Wanting is what destroyed the world, they are told in the run-up to “the Collapse”. But when Maz finds a piece of a machine that JP seems excited by, she starts questioning everything and her only thought is to escape.
This highly ambitious, tense novel makes you think hard about current world challenges and stays with you well after the final page, Mildenhall showing how humankind’s decisions affect generations. As the AI model says, “The power to change the future lies in the hands of the people of the present and my role is to help them in any way I can.”
The Illusions by Liz Hyder
(Allen & Unwin, $45)
In the late 1800s, the world was undergoing enormous change and women wanted a piece of the action. In The Illusions, Liz Hyder builds on the true story that illusionists were some of the first to see the great possibilities of moving pictures. They used the technology to help raise their magic to new levels – film can, after all, make a person disappear – and wow their upper-class audiences looking for the next entertaining trick.
In 1896 Bristol, Eadie Carleton is a photographer and the daughter of one who’s experimenting with moving pictures. She has a fortuitous meeting with feted magician George Perris, the heir apparent to the outgoing and ailing Professor, who has been the dominant conjuror in England for decades. Before long, Eadie and George start to explore what is possible with magic and film, but first there are all kinds of skulduggery to navigate. Another magician, the dastardly Roderick Skarratt, believes he is the rightful successor to The Professor, and will stop at nothing to get the title. He enlists the vulnerable but magically gifted 16-year-old Cecily Marsden as his assistant, and she is then taken under the wing of veteran conjuror Valentin, who has come from France to select the successor. As the characters prepare for a show to celebrate the famous conjuror’s life, the stakes are high.
A lover of the theatre, Hyder expertly pulls the strings behind the scenes while keeping the reader in the loop on some things, her characters each having their own fears and secrets. In this fast-paced, highly entertaining novel, by the author of last year’s impressive The Gifts, a series of excellent twists and turns are sprung as the finale comes.
A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty
(Allen & Unwin, $36.99)
Middle-aged Englishwoman Heather, nicknamed Bird, is a trained spy turned investigator of spies gone bad. From the first chapter she is on the run as the tables are turned and the Service comes after her. We learn as the novel unfolds that she has made financial mistakes which have compromised her with her boss, who she believes is dirty. She had been preparing for a possible exit and heads north from Birmingham to Scotland and beyond, using all the espionage skills she has. The daughter of a spy, small and agile, Bird is a good strategist, who manages to keep a step ahead of her pursuers – until one day she gets sloppy.
But there is more to Bird than a spook gone AWOL. This is the story of a woman in crisis, someone who has taken a few wrong turns in life but wants to believe she can still live a good one, as her mother would have wanted. She looks back on Flavia, at one time her closest friend. Bird supported her when she had her daughter by herself but they had a stupid falling-out. The novel muses on the sometimes unkind options for women as they reach their middle years. As Bird says, those who have families get their life changes imposed on them, while those who don’t must create them.
The story is often edge-of-the-seat, adrenalin-filled stuff, and the style of Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard, terse and to the point as she plants seeds of future revelation along the way. With Bird, Doughty gives the reader a highly intelligent, unemotional, flawed but impressive character for whom you want the best. Hopefully, she’ll produce more of this. We could certainly do with more middle-aged female spies in fiction.
