The writer borrows from the imagination of myths to offer a story about the precariousness of our links with nature.
In 2020, Australia, plagued by huge bushfires, lost nearly 5.8 million hectares of temperate forests, more than a fifth of its canopy. For many years, severe droughts and reduced rainfall caused by climate change have made this region among the driest in the world highly vulnerable.
You may have to live there on a daily basis, feel the burn of the sun on your skin, hear the animals suffocate, witness the drying up and rotting of the crops or see the precariousness in which the uncertainty plunges to understand the smallness of the human before the power of nature, the ravages caused by his hubris and his stubbornness to dominate, domesticate, exploit, take without ever giving in return.
This vulnerability is at the heart of The rain bird by Robbie Arnott, a reflection as fascinating as it is pitiless on the precariousness of the links which unite living beings to nature. To illustrate the magnitude of his subject, the Tasmanian writer borrows from the imagination of myths and builds a universe steeped in magical realism, at the crossroads of fantasy and dystopia, in which we enter with the lucid and impressionable eyes of the ‘childhood.
A recluse in the mountains since a coup sparked a civil war in her country, Ren survives thanks to trapping, foraging and her ingenuity. When soldiers, led by a magnetic woman, begin to follow in her footsteps, Ren is determined not to offer them what they came for: the Rainbird, a legendary heron made entirely of water, who can, with a wingbeat, stop the rain or start a storm.
Through the intertwined destinies of three women, Robbie Arnott hatches a story as fascinating as it is reflective where the grandiose landscapes and the vagaries of Mother Nature are matched only by the richness of human emotions. Here as in reality, everyone is both guilty and victim, selfish and generous, destructive and repentant. In a continual ebb and flow, the will to change things and to bow before the power and unpredictability of one’s environment is ceaselessly annihilated by the desire to move forward, to conquer, to control, to become master of the rain and good weather.
The novelist sketches memorable characters, magnified by all those nuances that make the human being, like any animal, both gentle and fearsome, sublime and indomitable. He recalls, in an ocular metaphor that evokes both Homer and Shakespeare, that the rest of the world lies in a change of perspective made of simplicity, destitution and hands outstretched to others than to oneself.