FICTION
Department of the Vanishing
Johanna Bell
Transit Lounge, $34.99
The publicity material for Department of the Vanishing mentions that this novel is “in the spirit of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask”, which is an ambitious claim given the success and innovation of Porter’s breakthrough verse novel. Johanna Bell is inspired by elements of Porter’s work, certainly, including its no-frills, straightforward poetic style and sexual frankness, but her book is more than just storytelling in poetry.
The author herself calls it “weird, experimental”, referring to the fact that Department is best described as a bricolage: an assemblage of text and pictures: poetic scraps, black-and-white images, archival material, lists, newspaper headlines and redacted police interviews.
This eco-fiction is set in the near future (2029), a time when not only has there been a mass extinction of birds, but their continuing disappearance seems unabated. Forty-three-year-old Ava works in the Department of the Vanishing, whose slogans are chirpier than warranted: “Never Say die!” and “Vanishing is our name but preservation is our game!”
Her role as an archivist is to catalogue the dead, to preserve and honour species by gathering a compendium of scientific and cultural information about them after they’ve been deemed extinct or perilously endangered. Technology old and new (including cassette tapes and microfiches) are deployed in her research.
Department is not for the cautious reader accustomed to a cohesive whole and a beginning and end to a story; it can take a while for the eye to adjust to the different choppy elements. Bell asks us to puzzle together these disparate clues in her world-building; be patient, the pay-off will be worth it. The mystery is not actually why these avian species have died off. The reasons are varied and many, take your pick: bushfires, rodenticides, loss of habitat, predation from wild cats, parasites, plastic pollution, driftnets and of course climate change and its environmental byproducts.
The obituaries of birds that are scattered throughout the book are heart-wrenching. Witness the last of the red-tailed black cockatoo (died September 3, 2027), “their demise didn’t raise any interest from media outlets despite it being announced in an email alert and press release”. Perhaps everyone has become acclimatised to the inevitable doom of feathery creatures, having already experienced the demise of the pelican, albatross, pied oystercatcher, magpie, silver gull, white-cheeked honeyeater and crimson rosella.
The loss of birds is compounded by the loss of Ava’s father, and this is the heart of the book, with the archivist trying to find out the circumstances around his disappearance back when she was still a child. Also distracting Ava is her relationship with Luke, whose dark sexual energy pulls her close. He dabbles in mixing beats, and her job inevitably colludes with his own desires. He’s like a lyrebird himself, using music to enchant and beguile.
With her own mother in hospital and dying, it’s the sex workers who work near her apartment that keep a maternal eye on Ava. They are described with metaphorical flourishes, a “twittering”, a “squabble of lorikeets”, “a flock of crimson finch”.
The power of Department is that it presents a scenario where it all seems scarily plausible to live in a world with an absence of birdsong. The book is a warning, a reckoning and a reminder to protect what we hold dear.
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Thuy On is an arts journalist, critic, editor and poet.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
