Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel Wild Dark Shore is, as the title promises, wild. Set in a world just a few years forward from our own it is a beautiful but also harrowing cautionary tale. McConaghy uses this set up to explore a range of broader themes.

Wild Dark Shore opens with the body of a woman, washed ashore on the rocky coast of a small sub-Antarctic island called Shearwater. The woman, who we learn is called Rowan, is patched up and brought back to health by the remaining inhabitants of the island – father Dominic and his three children – teenagers Raff, Fen and nine-year-old Orly. Shearwater was a research station but all of the researchers have gone. It is also the site of a global repository of seeds, but the storage facility is failing due to the melting permafrost and a rescue mission is coming to salvage as many of the seeds as possible. Rowan has come to the island to find her husband Hank who was the lead researcher, although she keeps this from her rescuers who themselves seem to be holding secrets about the island and what happened to the other people who were working there. But even with all of this obfuscation, Rowan develops relationships with all of the family, helping them and herself heal, at least until those many secrets come to light.

A key aspect of this novel is McConaghy’s description of the island and its animal inhabitants. Shearwater is based on the very real Macquarie Island, a place where in the past sealers and whalers had indiscriminately slaughtered the native wildlife. McConaghy brings the windy, freezing wildness of the island and its violent history to life but also manages to get across its fragility as rising sea levels and temperatures threaten its hardy but delicate ecosystem.

Wild Dark Shore is absolutely a climate story. Set sometime in the near future when fires and floods have affected the mainland and sea level rise is threatening Shearwater and its human and animal inhabitants. The seed rescue mission is focussed on rescuing saved seed stocks that are needed for human survival, not the decorative or unique plants that will be lost. And there is a strong thread in the narrative about whether it is right to bring new children into a world that is under this kind of threat.

While the climate effects drive much of the ticking clock element of the novel, Wild Dark Shore is much than just a clifi novel. Through its limited cast of characters and strict bounds, the island becomes a microcosm through which much broader issues can be distilled down and considered. This is a book about parents and children, about dealing with grief, about what we choose to prioritise and about how we live in the world.

Wild Dark Shore is more contemplative in its opening stages. But as its secrets emerge and the danger escalates, it becomes more dramatic, building to some breathless action scenes. But McConaghy has earned these beats and always keeps the characters and their shifting relationships at the centre, deepening those scenes and making them land with plenty of impact.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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9.0/10