The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

Zoe kept going out with her aunt, although her aunt did all the bleeding. She itched to wear scars of her own, to draw the squid with her own blood, but her aunt would not allow it.

When you’re older, she’d say. Your mother would kill me if I let you open a vein at your age.

Then she would laugh, because Zoe’s mother was dead. Her aunt didn’t find that funny – she laughed because she laughed at everything. It was the only response she was capable of, regardless of the situation. She laughed at jokes and television, but she also laughed at food and trees and weather reports. Breakfast made her laugh, as did rain, splinters and trousers. She laughed at good fortune and horror. The more tense or difficult the circumstances, the wilder she laughed. When she learned that her sister – Zoe’s mother – had died, she screamed, bit her cheek and cackled, spraying blood from her mouth across a tiled floor.

This the 2nd novel by my workmate Robbie Arnott. By day he is Senior Copywriter at Red Jelly ad agency, and contributes about 45% of the human energy manifested in the large mezzanine space in which we work. He did not give me this copy of his book, I bought it with my own money, and my resentment about this will surface later in the review.

Robbie Arnott by Matt Osborne

You read one book by someone and believe it gives you an insight into their stock-in-trade. Robbie's first book Flames was very grounded in Tasmania. "The environment is a character in the book" people sometimes say, but usually not to this extent. It had wry humour, relatable family dynamics, and a strong current of the fabulous running through it from go to whoa. It did really well too. To some degree I looked forward to this as a sequel.

What Flames didn't have was evil. (Thurston Hough was nasty but not evil). However one of the main characters in TRH is dispassionately brutal. There is wild remorseless nature, there are the usual human failings of greed, envy and obsession; but this one character named Harker damages others in a coldly calculating way, a way that is hard to take in large doses. I put the book down a few times for a break from Harker.

The setting of the book is a time not unlike now, in a place not unlike here. Imagine an unbroken landmass that encompasses climates from Tasmania's bitter, cold and mountainous southwest, up through the mainland wheat belt and desert, over into the high Australian Alps, and then further north into the sub tropics. The flora and fauna are familiar species, both endemic (cider gums, quolls) and European (fir trees, deer).

The story is broken into Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4; different settings which melt into each other as you progress through the book, with some surprising connections. This is done very cleverly and with a light touch. 

There's a skill in songwriting, in setting up then avoiding an obvious rhyme. Eg Clementine by Megan Washington [It sounds a lot less banal than this looks]. "Oh my darling / Clementine / Turn the water / into holy water". Robbie pulls a similar trick towards the end of The Rain Heron where you start to feel you know his methods, you have the pattern of the book, you are galloping towards the climax and he just declines to provide the obvious narrative end point that you are anticipating. You are left with an itch unscratched. I assume he has deliberately crafted this, just like I assume Washington knows full well that the only thing anyone turns WATER into is WINE.

There is a lot of flesh in this book; beautifully described. Corpses, wounds, infections, real and imagined anatomies. One of Robbie's friends said to him "oh god do you realise how much PUS is in this book?" 

I give it 4 stars out of 5. I would have gone for 4.5 stars except for one word: "navy" as a synonym for the ocean. I'm just not having it. He did it in the first book too. I have addressed this with him and I trust we will not have to have that conversation again.