Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting with Australian author and regular contributor to both The Monthly and to the Saturday Paper, James Bradley. As always, Michael is here to tell me a bit more about the
episode him Michael Ruby Jones. Hello, So, Michael, I wanted to start by asking you a bit of a big question. In times like this, times of global disquiet, when the world feels like it's in a state of crisis, how do you carve out time to read fiction?
Yeah? Ruby, that is more or less the question. It's the one I think about all the time. It's very hard not to occasionally worry that stories, even powerful, brilliant, angry, engaged, stories that actively grapple with the present moment, are still something of an indulgence. You know, people don't change their minds,
let alone their behavior. The most compelling writing in the world still, by and large speaks only to the people who are already primed to hear it, you know, like, let's face it, how's a beautiful poem, or even an incisive essay or a gripping page turner of a novel any more than a flight of fancy. But I believe that without great writing, without great reading, we're completely lost. Books remind us of our humanity. They show us the truth.
They allow us the opportunity to conceive of an alternative to the worst of times out there. To read is to imagine and dream and empathize with others, if that's not all too high minded. And a writer like James Bradley, who on this occasion is writing a crime novel, is someone who clearly grapples with these questions in the question of producing work, not only overcoming kind of the anxiety of self doubt or creative purpose or whatever. But why
does this matter now? Why should people give over the time to read this book now? And James Bradley is a writer who does that in spades. He's an incredible journalist. He writes some amazing science writing. He brought out a book last year called deep Water, which was a kind of book length essay about their Oceans is really kind of terrific and thoughtful. But if James Bradley says it's time to read a crime novel, I'm inclined to listen.
And James Bradley is one of those authors that doesn't shy away from the more complicated issues that face us today, and this is especially true of his latest novel, Landfall.
Right Yeah, So, Landfall's a crime novel that is set in this volatile, climate destroyed future version of Sydney where rising numbers of displaced people and refugees alongside rising sea levels have created a world on the edge. So against his backdrop, he has a missing girl and as is the tradition and in person stories, in crime, time is running out, a sensation that is only heightened by the sense that it's happening on a planet and in a city where time is running out in a range of ways.
You know, how do you keep people safe? And that's the thing. It's not only a gripping read, but it's one that's grappling with themes and issues that are at the forefront of collective consciousness. James Bradley knows what he's doing and he really knocks this one out of the Park.
Coming up in just a moment, James Bradley thinks kindness is a superpower.
I wanted to start with the crime genre beats of landfall, rather than the climate or the speculative stuff. I wanted to start with crime, and I wanted to ask you whether you're a big reader of crime fiction.
I am a reader of crime fiction, and I'm a real admirer of it. I mean, I think that the best of it is really I mean, it's really powerful writing, but it has a kind of capacity to, I guess, dive into the kind of fault lines both in societies and in human beings, which I think is really really interesting, and it's one of the things I really wanted to use when it came to this because seemed to me a really interesting way of thinking about the world I
was trying to write about. But the only these things I love about crime is it's an incredibly elastic genre. So it's one of these kind of genres. It's incredibly various. People use it to do all sorts of things, but there's always that kind of social commentary kind of sitting at the heart of the stuff that I find a really interesting.
Yeah, No, I think that's something I like about it to I remember in an old interview aar rank And talking about being able to take his character from a mansion or an opening gala in one scene to a commission flab in the next scene and not being incongruous when you're writing in crime, that you actually get the chance to cut through that cross section of a society in ways that are really useful.
And yes, and then that is exactly what I wanted
this to be able to do. So I wanted to write a book which kind of put a larger society at the center of it, which also allowed you to go from you know, the world of the rich to the world of the very poor, from the world of displaced to the world of the people who are doing really well, and also to kind of pull in stories because one of the great things about crime is it's not just diving into kind of the social worlds, it's diving into kind of people's psychology in a really deep
kind of way. I mean, there's that wonderful line which I thought was Chandler, but I must say I looked up recently and I couldn't find it. But this person who may have been Chandler talked about, you know, crime being the poetry of the city, and I kind of always loved that idea.
There is also something about the police procedure, or the category into which your book falls that is also you know, there's something about the psychology of people who are responsible for implementing the social strictures of the day. And increasingly, you know, as we've seen, the crime genre have to adapt to perhaps a more complex understanding of the challenges of modern policing and the ways in which it goes wrong.
By having a protagonist whose job is to enforce the status quo, you manage to bring in tremendous complexity.
Absolutely, and there was actually something I thought about a lot when I was writing it. I mean, I did worry a little bit about kind of inhabiting that side of the argument. I mean that kind of sense that you know, you wonder about the kind of ethics of writing from somebody you know who's a cop basically. But at the same time, as you say, there is a kind of complexity that brings to bear and I think
that's absolutely present in the novel. I mean, one of the things that the novel does is the main character, someone who has ended up on the wrong side of a whole series of those questions. You know, she's been the subject of harassment, she has gotten herself into trouble with other officers, and is someone who is very aware of the clim deficiencies I guess of the organization that she works for and the kinds of work that she does, but also wants to do the right thing.
How conscious are you when writing into a genre space of how useful the familiar or expected beats are that you can get away with certain shorthands or certain things because you know that a readership is well conditioned in the conventions into which you're writing. I'm thinking, for example, you know your protagonist has a new partner who she's meeting for the first time at the start of the book.
That's such a classic crime genre trope that rather than an established partnership, you get their unease and the distrust and the working out can they be a team or are they going to be at odds? Is that part of the fun of writing into genre to be able to go, Okay, I know what these beats look like, and then I can subvert them or embrace them as I see fit.
I think people often think about genre as a kind of box that you put things into, and I never see it like that. I always see genre as a kind of toolkit, you know, that you can kind of say, look, here's this thing that will be really interesting, here's this thing that will be really useful for the kind of story that I want to tell, and then you can
take that and use it. You know. You talk about those kind of established beats, but one of the things that those beats do is they let readers understand what
kind of story it is. You know, They kind of, as you say, they do quite a lot of the work for you immediately, and there is something very pleasurable about hitting those beats that kind of sense there's this kind of sturdy genre of shape there that you're working with that will take you somewhere, which can also then subvert and play with in different kinds of ways, you know.
And I find I actually find that, as you say, really enjoyable about being able to say, look, this is going to work like this, because I know that that kind of thing works.
It seems to me one of the underpinning things of crime fiction is a crime occurs. In the case of this book, a child goes missing, and that's a disruption to the natural order of things. And so then what we want is detective protagonist to somehow restore peace and restore harmony and let the world keep ticking over without
this fracture of this terrible act. But of course, if you set your crime novel in a climate apocalyptic future where the natural order is already completely destroyed, completely disturbed as a reader, that immediately unsettles. We're not restoring the status quo. We're just trying to hang on to whatever can be left.
Yeah, I think that's a really good way of encapsulating what the book's trying to do. I mean, what I wanted to do was to kind of push those things up against each other. That sense that you have a world that is profoundly out of balance already, and then this other thing happens in it. There's not a sense
that world can get put back together. I mean, one of things I found really interesting about writing it was when I wrote Clade, which is probably you know, it's probably nearly fifteen years ago now, there wasn't much fiction in that kind of climate space, and one of the things I was doing, quite self consciously was trying to work out what kind of story you could tell that would let you talk about climate, because climate is such an amorphous and difficult thing to kind of write about.
You know, the tools of the novelists are essentially kind of social tools around character and setting and things like that, and climate doesn't resolve into those things. You know, it's a kind of global messy thing. And you know, I came up with a kind of series of solutions to that problem, which were about kind of as I think other people did, about kind of developing different sorts of
narrative shapes that could kind of hold that story. And what's kind of fascinating to me, is it ten years down the track you can say it none to write a crime story in that space, Like there's something about that sense that that space has altered, that the world has altered around us in ways it emidst telling stories in that space that are in a sense more conventionally shaped, but which don't fear you'll you know, climate's a really big part of this novel. It's kind of right at
the center of it. But in a sense, it's not the subject of the novel. It's the context of the novel. It's the world of the novel lives in, And I guess there's something really interesting to me about the way that we've gone from having to develop these shapes to be able to just position it within our world. That says something about how much the kind of process of climate change has moved over that decade or decade and a half.
You talked about the ways in which the context, the timing, the place, the geopolitical and climate realities of this book are not the subject, but they're the world. Tell me how much world building you did before you dropped your story into the middle of it. Did you begin with an idea? Did you begin because I know you're a great reader and writer of science journalism of different sorts.
Did you project a particular path for the world before you started telling the story or did that kind of become clearly as he went along.
Look, I think that both, to be honest. I mean, I think my initial idea was that I wanted to find a way of writing something which put kind of climate migration at the center. Like I'd already written several books with kind of climate in them, but I wanted one that was more explicitly engaged with kind of questions of justice and questions of dislocation and you know, refugees,
those kinds of issues. And I guess what I thought to myself was something along the lines of it's you know, it's maybe a generation from now, thirty years And then I thought, so, what's happened? It's much hotter, and water, I knew was a really big part of the novel. I wanted that sense of rising water, of rain or flooding, of all of those kinds of things kind of intruding into the book. I also generally have a view that with this kind of fiction, you don't want to put
that stuff at the center. I mean, generally, we don't talk about the things that are the fabric of our world. They're just there, you know. We don't talk about the phones that we carry around. We don't talk about the weather, you know, like it's just part of the fabric of the world. So what I wanted to do was have that sense that you're in a world and then you kind of glimpse the structure of it in the background.
I guess when we return, James discusses the creation of his lead characters and reveals by kindness is so important both in his novel and in the world. We'll be right back. I want to get to your protagonist and her family in a moment, but before we get to them, i'd love it if you could talk a little bit about Tassin as a character, because he's incredibly important to the book and is very resonant with a number of
your previous novels. He's the kind of character that I think of as a quintessentially James Bradley's creation.
Oh that's really interesting. So to see Hm as a young Indonesian guy. He's about sixteen, and he has left
Indonesia because Indonesia is a complete disaster. You know, there are storms, there are heat waves, and his mother and his sister dying one of these heat waves, and so he kind of makes his way to Australia on a boat and ends up in detention and then eventually leaves detention and in the course of the novel finds himself stumbling across this crime as it happens and is trying to find the missing girl at the same time as the as the detective is, and he is he's a
character I felt a lot of kind of affection for He's this bright, kind kid who's trying to get by, but is also bearing this kind of massive wave of trauma. His story in any ways, carries a lot of the kind of thematic weight of the novel. I think, you know, because although he is now in this city that's half flooded, you know, he's kind of bearing that stuff around, but
he has this goodness about him. You know, he's someone who is actually trying to do this thing, trying to find this kid, and not because he has to do it, because he thinks he needs to, you know, in a world that has not helped him to.
Sim embodies that sense of common humanity in the face of kind of no reason to maintain faith in those things, no reason to feel a responsibility to them or to be driven by that in any way. And yet he just almost unthinkingly identifies a space where he's required to help,
and he puts himself into that role. And I think in a story set against climate catastrophe, that's kind of the human question is how does a single missing child, How does a small scale, in many ways small scale crime story have weight in the context of global disaster.
Yeah, And I mean, in fact, that sense of kindness of doing the right thing is really kind of central to the novel. I mean, it's a novel that at one level is quite bleak, you know. I mean it's set in this kind of ruined world, but you have people in it trying to do the right thing, and there are kind of random acts of kindness at various points in the book. And I actually think that's really important. I mean, I think that we we live in a
world which does a series of things. One of them is that it tells us that in bad situations, people behave badly, and in fact, the evidence is that that's not the case. I mean, you only have to look at what happened up in the floods a couple of years ago, the Northern Rivers, you know, the government failed to turn up, and people went out in their tinees and kind of rescued their neighbors and looked after each other.
But also because I I think we live in a cultural moment where there is this notion that somehow kindness is weakness and that cruelty is strength, I think actually pushing back on that's really really important because I don't think that's true at all. I mean, I actually think kindness is a kind of superpower.
I think one of the key tools in any novel. But in this novel, you're protagonist, Senior Detective Azad Sada, and in particular, I'm thinking about her relationship with her father, AmAm, which is incredibly moving, and Amaan is in a rapidly deteriorating state, suffering from dementia, and so you have this kind of very real illustration of that sense of loss, that sense of things slipping away, and that sense of
not being at home in this new reality. Can you talk a bit about your conception of Sada and her relationship with her father at the heart of this book.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that about him, because one of the things I very much wanted Aman to be is he's someone who's kind of losing his memory, and he is a literal example of this sense of the slipping away of a kind of past, that kind of sense that you're now lost in this new reality. So she is the studio, is the daughter of an Australian mother and of Aman, who's a Bangladeshi. She was born
in Bangladesh. They came to Australia after the melt where there's this kind of catastrophic rise in sea levels after lots of Antarctica collapses, and she's kind of grown up here, but she, in the same way that Tasimas is carrying a lot of trauma and a lot of past, and the two of them are together in this quite complicated kind of way. She's now caring for him. They've clearly
had quite a complicated relationship over the years. But that sense of her trying to juggle, trying to juggle these two things, trying to juggle this kind of job as a police detective and this job of caring for someone who's in such a such a difficult state, is something that I felt I really wanted for her, that kind of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple directions at once.
Before I let you go, I have to ask the ways in which the climate elements of this imagined future playout. Please tell me they're entirely imagine and not the basis of kind of very credible research you've done in a likely scenario for five years, ten years. Hence, James Bradley, tell me you made loll up. Tell me it's all pretend.
I mean, I think that the world of the book is a kind of extrapolation from where we are, it's not a particularly unreasonable one. I don't think. I think, on the track that we're on, it's a pretty reasonable one.
At the moment. I thought a lot over the last you know, year or two about where we are with climate, and if you'd ask me ten years ago, I would have said that I thought that there will come a moment where the dissonance between what's happening in our lack of action will become so great that there'll be a kind of shift in public sentiment, that we will move from denial to panic. And I don't know that I
think that's true anymore. I mean, I think half of LA burned down a few months ago and people looked at it and said that's because of diversity policies in the LA Fire Department. So that kind of sense that there's going to be this kind of sea change in opinion, I don't think that's there. And I mean I look at our political leadership in Australia and it's profound lack of action on a series of things that are happening. You know, we're still opening fossil fuel projects. You know,
we're still I mean in Sydney around the corner. For me, there's a new block of Flatch, which one of the advertisements for it, you know, boasts that it's got gas connections all through it. I mean this kind of sense that we're not even doing the kind of basic stuff that we need to do, and I think increasingly for the lesson we need to take from that is that you know, nobody is coming to save us. You know, at the end of the day, it's actually up to us.
Our governments are not going to save us, and this kind of handing over of responsibility to other people can't continue. Like we actually have to start saying to ourselves, they're not going to save us, these guys are actually the problem, and start asking some hard questions about what we do about that.
James Bradley's latest novel, Landfall, is available at all good bookstores now, and a reminder that work of nonfiction from last year is called deep Water.
It's also terrific.
I recommend you get both.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. We'll be back next Sunday with more from Rackel. As always, if you want to dive further into the show, you can search for it Wherever you listen to podcasts, there are more than eighty episodes in the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.