(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
We live in an age where people are, with a few notable exceptions, divorced from the natural world, or what’s left of it, around them.
We catch our trains, eat at our favourite restaurants and live our concrete-clad, digitally buttressed lives without any sense of the wildness and unpredictability of the outside environment having any effect on us whatsoever.
But in Charlotte McConaghy’s masterfully rich novel Wild Dark Shore, nature is inescapable with the Salt family – dad Dominic, kids Fen and Raff (both older teenagers) and nine-year-old Orly – living lives heavily circumscribed by the fact that home is an isolated island, Shearwater Island to be precise, thousands of kilometres from anywhere else, deep in the Southern Ocean on the way to Antartica.
Their lives are influenced by the massive storms, increasing in occurrence and intensity as climate change supercharges once wholly-natural cycles, that roll in, by the ebb and flow of daylight, especially when one storm knocks out their two major sources of power, forcing them to conserve everything including the food supplies that only arrive with the occasionally scheduled supply ships.
This storm doesn’t change things for them too much since they are used to roughing it and doing without but it does deliver to them a woman named Rowan, who almost drowns in the ferocious waves and whose mysterious reason for being so far from anywhere has more to do with the Salt family than of them, or her for that matter, realises.
The air of Shearwater is thick with the spirits of the dead. Fen knows this and isn’t bothered by it. Raff doesn’t believe her, but in the hours of true night she has seen them. The spectres, flickering green lights out at sea or in the mountains above her, and even once quite close on the beach. She wonders if this means she is marked for a different kind of life, if it is yet another oddity that will ensure she doesn’t fit in back on the mainland. But she isn’t frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.
This wholly unexpected encounter sets in train a series of epiphanies, revelations and events, and while they are cataclysmic in one sense, McConaghy delivers with a quiet, nuanced sense of power that falls very much in line with the natural world around them.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the storyline in Wild Dark Shore is some sort of bucolic delight.
The novel is an often dark thing, full of introspection, a haunting sense of place and an awareness that the dead, animal, bird and human – Shearwater was once a place of mass bloody seal and penguin harvesting until it was preserved and became a place of natural sanctuary for birds, seals and the occasional passing Humpback Whale – are always around them, with Orly in particular able to hear the voices of the spirits which seem to swirl around them with unceasingly prescient companionship.
But while Dominic and the kids and Rowan grow closer and it appears that there might be a chance for all of them to begin again together on an island that an emotionally scarred by open to nature Fen freely says is killing them, there are a multitude of secrets swirling around them, and anything positive that comes of this meeting between long-time residents and new arrival is not going to come about with some pain and a fierce fight against innumerable odds.
Whatever transpires must almost play second fiddle to the massive seed vault on the island, there to ensure an increasingly beleaguered natural world has some sort of ability to survive the terrors being visited upon it by people.
Orly is fascinated by the seeds and the natural world as a whole and he bonds with Rowan, who has suffered great trauma of her own at the hands of a natural world now impelled by humanity’s ruinous medalling to be more destroyer than nurturer, as he tells her about various plants and how fascinating they are, and it is this rather beautifully trusting relationship which gives the final act of Wild Dark Shore such an emotional charge.
For all its haunting sadness and lingering loss, and there’s a lot of it in Wild Dark Shore, the novel is, at its fiercely burning heart, a story about the lengths people go to protect those they love; Dom, as he’s often called, will do anything for his children, all too aware that after a great loss of their own, that he must be there for them, even if sometimes his parenting leaves a little to be desired.
Rowan too is on a mission for the person she loves/once loved/feels a sense of responsibility for, and it’s the collide between Rowan and Dom and his family, but also the commonality of purpose and emotion they come to share, which gives Wild Dark Shore such immense and impossible to ignore emotional power.
But for all of the big twists and massive emotional reveals of the novel, what really stands out is the nuanced and thoughtfully impassioned way that McConaghy, a masterful writer at the top of her arrestingly immersive game, delivers the story of people at the end of themselves who might also have the chance at some sort of new beginning.
As the kids chat I watch their dad’s eyes, I watch how that gaze moves between each of his children’s faces, I see the pride there, the swelling of his chest, the tiny quirks of his lips, the joy they give him. I think how lucky they are to have him, that it into his care they were born. What a gift to be so well loved.
The love inherent in Wild Dark Shore is mind-boggling intense, and it survives through all manner of narrative twists and turns, of Raff’s fury, Fen’s sense of dislocation and Dom’s imprisonment in the past and a whole host of secrets that eventually all find the light of day as secrets usually do.
It’s this sense of love for the natural world, for the people close to them and for the need to do what must be done for those people to be protected and love that gives Wild Dark Shore so much of its intensely alive readability.
While we think of the natural world as a place of placid landscapes and sweeping vistas, the truth is it is often blisteringly alive and unceasingly big and unable to be ignored, its fury and ferocity as evident as the wonderment and beauty it also holds.
It’s in this inherently roiling environment, which drives people to great acts of cruelty but also self-sacrificial love that the majestically intense, psychologically wearing and emotionally bruising events of Wild Dark Shore take place, and while there is happiness and a potentially promising future to be had, it is hard-won, sometimes hard-edged and dependent on a mysteriousand troubled past being left behind them.
It’s either way bet that this can be done but as the weeks count down to the arrival of the final supply ship which will take them all of an island about to be swallowed by an ocean now full of almost wholly destructive power – though in the kelp forests around then island, and in the rescued seeds from the vault, the beauty and promise of nature still exists – Dom, his family and Rowan will have to fight hard, both within ourselves, between each other and with the secrets of the past to find a future where maybe new life can bloom after all.