Australian author James Bradley has long been interested in exploring the impacts of climate change through fiction with books like Clade and Ghost Species. His latest book, Landfall is climate fiction crossed with a police procedural. While in Landfall Bradley depicts a possible future Australia, he is also interested in the impacts of a changing climate on other countries and the resulting movement of people to find safety.
Landfall opens by the Tideline, an area of Sydney where rising sea-levels have made some low lying coastal areas uninhabitable or the refuge for the poor and dispossessed who live on upper stories of flooded multi-storey buildings. Detective Sadiya Azad and her partner Paul Findlay are dispatched to the area to investigate the disappearance of a five-year-old girl. At the same time, Tasim, a refugee living on the streets of Sydney sees a young girl being put in the back of a van and despite having nothing, is determined to try and rescue her. Adding pressure to the whole situation, there is an impending tropical cyclone which is predicted to hammer an already fragile and damaged city.
Like any good crime novel, the investigative procedure is a framework which Bradley uses to explore his milieu. Azad and Findlay can range around the city and start to step on some toes when they discover the potential involvement of a high powered employee of a company that builds detention centres and new weather-proof developments. But through this, Bradley also hangs the backstories of Azad, her father Arman, now suffering from dementia and reliving his younger years in his mind, and Tasim who all came to Australia as climate refugees – forced from their countries by killer heatwaves and destructive flooding.
Bradley provides plenty to chew on thematically in Landfall. From a frighteningly believable future Sydney, to the way Australia treats refugees, to the usual rounds of development and corruption at the expense of the poor, to dealing with a loved one with dementia, to coercive control. Bradley bakes these issues, where he can, into the narrative but that is not always successful and this layering of additional plot lines and issues does make the whole venture a little shaggy. Arman’s story, for example, while interesting, has no connection to the main plot other than the fact that he lives with Sayida and his condition makes her life more complicated.
If Landfall falls down anywhere it is that it is not a particularly surprising crime story. The investigators seem to spend a lot of their time going round in circles to learn things they could have learnt earlier. And the payoff, while possibly satisfying for the reader and tending to cathartic as it takes place at the height of the promised mega-storm, does not really make any sense. But Landfall is really a book where the mystery is just the hook for a depiction of what increasingly feels like an accurate portrait of a potential global future.
Landfall by James Bradley
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