The Campers
by Maryrose Cuskelly (Allen & Unwin, $36.99)
Maryrose Cuskelly’s 2022 debut The Cane was a highly praised tale of rural noir, a genre which has become a mainstay of Australian crime fiction. Despite its title, the rather wonderful The Campers is set in a wealthy urban neighbourhood that backs on to a reserve. Our protagonist, 35-year-old mother of two Leah, along with her academic husband Moses – some 15 years older – are outwardly living the Aussie suburban dream.
She’s on maternity leave from her communications job after having her second child, the result of a birth control slip-up.
Privately, she feels at sea, a situation not helped when her husband pesters her about returning to work. “The currents and swells of her life as a mother, a wife, the financial pressures of paying off a mortgage, engulfed her. She was trapped, enmeshed in a life she hadn’t wholly chosen.”
She’s not above acting on a reckless impulse to “blow up her life” but reasons that behaviour – which had been prevalent in her not-so-distant past – has been “reined in by motherhood, a mortgage, approaching middle age”.
That assumption will be tested when a ragged group of itinerant campers set up in the neighbouring reserve. One of their tents has an Aboriginal flag draped over it even though the campers seem to come from a variety of backgrounds. Soon, property goes missing in the neighbourhood and a car is vandalised. Due to an obscure council bylaw the campers can’t be evicted. Instead, the council offers them free passes to a local sports centre where they can use the bathrooms, and provides them with food, support services and new groundsheets.
The situation sends the neighbourhood chat group into a woke tizzy – some move to support the campers, while others want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
Cuskelly captures perfectly a nation’s dilemma in the group’s competing reactions. As one person says: “All I’m saying is let’s remember whose land we’re living on.” Another says, “When did this become a land rights issue?”
Within a few days, the camp’s leader – a taut, attractive man with dreadlocks, who may be homeless by choice, catches Leah’s attention. She’s enthralled by his physical presence, a combination of feral magnetism and danger. But will she take the infatuation beyond idle fantasy?
The Campers confirms Cuskelly as a writer to watch. This is both a compelling domestic drama and a sly examination of guilt and privilege. It gets the reading year off to a great start. Highly recommended.
The Day of the Roaring
by Nina Bhadreshwar (Hemlock Press, $37.99)
Nina Bhadreshwar’s Sheffield-set crime fiction debut also examines issues of race, class and history. The Day of the Roaring gets down to business quickly with the discovery of the severed head of a principal locked inside a filing cabinet at the site of his old school. Detective Inspector Diana Walker, who is black, is tasked with solving the case, which will hit uncomfortably close to home.
In one sense this is a straightforward police procedural, but as Walker’s investigation delves into Sheffield’s burgeoning immigrant communities, the focus broadens, encompassing the intricacies of school funding, her own mother’s Black Sistah’s book club, female genital mutilation and Walker’s toxic relationship with an ex, right back to Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.
The story is told in dated chapters – the majority set in 2010 – mostly from Walker’s viewpoint, but Bhadreshwar also incorporates diaries, letters and news reports. At times, the author lays it on a little thick. Characters say things like, “You think black women are born survivors? You want to come down to my clinic, see how death warrants are dished out in neglect and abuse? Poverty’s an apocalypse in slow motion.”
But alongside the didacticism there are some moving passages, especially when dealing with Walker’s grandmother’s life-altering experiences in 1950s Kenya.
Ultimately, though, The Day of the Roaring, which was written as part of the author’s master’s degree in crime fiction, falls prey to a common failing of first-time novelists: trying to cram a lifetime’s experience into the narrative whether it fits or not. The result is that many readers will get lost in the surfeit of characters and issues competing for their attention and will put this down unfinished.
There’s a good novel somewhere here, though I’m not sure it’s a thriller.
