"One of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader."
This is one of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader, and the effects of climate change on landscape and wildlife at its core.
The setting is a remote island, Shearwater, based on Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica. A research team has been forced to abandon its project because of rising sea levels; central to this work is a subterranean seedbank designed to last far into the future, but now threatened with flooding. Various disasters, slowly revealed, have left the Salt family - father Dom, teenagers Raff and Fen and nine-year-old Orly - as the sole inhabitants of an old lighthouse until a shipwreck survivor, Rowan, is rescued from the sea. Deliberate sabotage of the communication equipment has left the islanders unable to summon help from the mainland; they can only wait for the evacuation ship to arrive in six weeks' time.
At first it's uncertain that Rowan will survive. Nursed by the family, she does, but both she and they are hiding secrets. Why did she set out for the island? What is Dominic hiding in the underground vault? How did his wife die, and what has disturbed Fen so much that she can't sleep indoors?
The seedbank gives a focus on all that's threatened and is a powerful metaphor for the intensive crop farming we already depend on. Time and space make it impossible to save all the seeds - but which should be prioritised? Those already known to be food crops? Those that are fire-resistant? Those whose qualities are as yet unknown? Rowan sees the terrible dilemma this poses: "how to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favour of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland."
There are plenty of thrills, twists and revelations, but what made this such a compelling book for me is its focus on landscape, weather and climate adaptation. The black sands where the seals breed, watched over by Fen, are disappearing under rising tides; Rowan has experienced the devastating loss by fire of a house and land she had come to love. But there are glorious moments too, including an episode where these characters achieve the seemingly-impossible rescue of a beached humpbacked whale and her calf.
Strong characterisation and a range of viewpoints bring us close to each character in turn: to Dom, who cares passionately for his children and believes himself to be haunted by his dead wife; to the teenagers, who've known little else but solitary island life; to nine-year-old Orly, drawn to Rowan as a substitute mother; to Rowan herself, who at first sees the future only as bleak: 'everything will be drowned, burned or starved' as the climate becomes increasingly inhospitable. Later, through her involvement with the family, she (with the reader) begins to see possibilities for them all when they leave Shearwater. But nothing is certain in this dangerous, changing world. The sinuous plot keeps us hooked to the end of this story with heart and soul as well as thrills.
Wild Dark Shore is published by Canongate.
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