The World Without Us

Mirielle Juchau

Bloomsbury/Allen&Unwin

Otago Daily Times, September 19th 2015

Australian author Mireille Juchau describes her third novel, The World Without Us, as an elegy to a changing landscape and a family and community in crisis.

Set in a fictional rural town on the country’s Northern coast, a community of artisans and farmers that is slowly but surely dying as the surrounding land is sold off for fracking, it centres around the Müller family, who are struggling to cope with both the death of the youngest daughter, Pip, and the disappearance of the bees upon which their income depends.

Stefan, for whom beekeeping is as much a philosophy of life as a business, spends his days tending his hives and his nights drinking to escape, while his wife, Evangeline –Lina– who seems to have become completely unmoored from reality. Now she disappears each day, rain or shine, pushing an empty pram and carrying an unfurled umbrella (an affectation that put me in mind of Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip) returning, dishevelled and muddy and without explanation at the end of the day.

Meanwhile their eldest daughter, Tess, has retreated into self-imposed silence, leaving her sister Meg to speak for both of them. Then Stefan unearths a human bones on their land, a discovery that forces Lina to relive events from her childhood in The Hive – a commune in the hills above the town whose legacy remains both in the fiery scars on her skin and an absence of memory that, until now, she has refused to examine.

The novel explores the way the external environment alters the weather inside, the family’s slow disintegration mirroring that of the surrounding environment, and is heavy – in places overly-heavy – in symbolism:Pip’s death is intimately coupled with the destruction of the forest; Lina builds her memorial in an ancient quandong, Meg in a series of drawings of trees so bent their branches are rooted to the ground, and the first hints of recovery and renewal come during a tree-planting ceremony on covenanted ground.

Similarly, the loss of the bees reflects the poisoning of the land, and Evangeline herself is literally and figuratively a child of The Hive, the Queen around whom circle a collection of lost and damaged individuals, victims of physically or emotionally absent or abusive parents unable to heal until she does.

Yet, for all the loss and grief that drive its characters, I found myself unable to become emotionally engaged. Although Juchau’s use of an eye-of-god narrator provides the reader easy access into her characters minds and memories, it also serves to distance us from the action. And even the central dramatic moment of the story occurs off-stage, the third-act building of tension suddenly evaporating into a series of epilogue-like closing scenes that left me feeling strangely cheated.

That said, The World Without Us has received glowing reviews elsewhere, joining novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in the new and loosely-defined genre of ‘Climate Change Fiction’. Although not to my tastes, it is likely to appeal to anybody who has read and enjoyed her previous novels or short stories.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/people-and-land-story-lacks-emotional-engagement