The corrosive power of secrets is on full, ever tense, slowly building display in Veronica Lando’s debut novel The Whispering, a story which understands how the past can come crashing into the present and throw the future, in its all troubled and glorious possibility, into doubt.
Set in Far North Queensland in the fictitious small town of Granite Creek, The Whispering centres on Callum Haffenden, a middle-aged man who’s drawn back to the hometown he left some thirty years earlier when an accident sent him and his parents south to Hobart for better medical care.
For reasons that become progressively clearer as this beguilingly intense book goes on, Callum doesn’t really want to be back but he feels he has no choice but to return, the impelling reasons behind that slowly leaked as Lando weaves a story rooted in the muddy depths of what happens when decisions made years earlier finally come home to roost.
The trigger for his return is the disappearance of a young man in the town, a husband and father who, to all appearances, is an upstanding member of the community.
He has gone missing out in a part of the rainforest that rings the town like a suffocating but beautiful necklace called the Boulders, giant balls of granite one atop the other through raging waters pass and in which a number of people have died, including two girls lost seventeen years apart, all of them lured here, so the mythology goes, by a whisper that begs them to leave the path and go onto paths far less trodden.
His mouth pooled with the acidic taste of bile. He snapped the folder shut, and the groan of the air conditioner ratcheted up a notch, drowning out the downpour outside and the scream inside his head.
While the people of Granite Creek, who do not take well in large part to Callum’s return, ostensibly don’t believe that there is a mysteriously scary voice luring people to their deaths, in practice they behave as if it is real, with kids given tinkling bells to wear around their wrists to block out the whisper and adults taking great care not to go to the rainforest alone and certainly not to leave the beaten track if they do so.
This is less magical realism that palpable paranoid fear finding manifestation, their frightened minds reaching for an explanation for events in the mystical rather than admitting that there is something rotten at the heart of the town.
As Callum digs down into the dark secrets long held close to the figurative chest of the town, it becomes unnervingly apparent that, no matter how much it might be costing them, that many people would prefer the past to stay well within the past.
But, of course, that rarely happens, and while Callum wants to forget a great many painful things he has experienced, the truth is that’s all but impossible when so much of his present, and the great mystery that fills the book, is rooted in a series of dark events over the last thirty years.
The brilliance of The Whispering is that it executes flawlessly that trickiest of gambits in crime writing – setting mood and place and maintaining it without giving away too much too quickly.
In fact, it’s building towards a big reveal is done in such perfectly-judged increments that you never at any time feel as if your enjoyment of the story is impaired in any way.
Just why is Callum back when, at the start of the novel, it appears there is no reason for him to be there? And why does he persist in the face of opposition and harassment and a strong sense that, old friends like Eddy and Steph aside, he is definitely not wanted and he would be better served by going to Hobart and never returning to Granite Creek?
These two key questions hang over the first third or so of The Whispering like enticingly menacing clouds and if allowed to persist would have rendered Callum as nothing more than a mad, inert protagonist who is, as many townsfolk allege, a waste of everyone’s time.
He’s nothing of the sort of course but it would be easy to see him that way if Lando didn’t take immaculate care in building him as a sympathetic character who has quite valid reasons to be there, all of which are revealed so perfectly that you never feel as if you’re in the dark and with such deft good judgement that the narrative always feel enriched and emboldened by these revelations.
A pause.
‘What did you say?’ Brett asked.
‘You need to leave your family al–‘
Brett spun. A flash of fury over his face and a fist almost too fast to see. Blinding pain across Callum’s jaw and his leg gave way. A final terrified image of Amelia’s eyes swam across his memory before his vision went black, and the ground rushed up to meet him.
The momentum of The Whispering never flags once, driven by an intriguing mystery, the associated dark tendrils of the past that wrap around it, and the consequences of secrets being kept by characters who are far from being cardboard cutouts and who spring fully formed from the pages of the book.
As with any well-written crime novel, and The Whispering is definitely among that rarefied number, no one is what they seem, and while not everyone is harbouring deep, deep secrets or skulking in the shadows – many of them, in fact, are far from evil and merely brokenly human, something that adds gradation and cadence to the story – enough people re hiding behind facades that guessing who did what and why is not even remotely easy.
Which is good; who wants an easily dissected crime novel?
In the end, The Whispering is less a beguiling mystery, though it very much is that with layers aplenty and no certainty the truth will be easily uncovered, and more a forensic examination of the human condition and what happens when a host of past decisions bob up like a long buried corpse right in the middle of the present.
The beauty of The Whispering is that never once feels contrived or overdone but rather grounded, very human and rawly honest, all too aware that while people want to do the right thing, they rarely do for a host of complicated reasons and that in that shadowy place between intention and execution lurk all the consequences of those decisions, none of which are easily examined or explained, fortunately for us because it makes for a damn good read, one that stick with you for quite some time after the last page is turned.