Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting
Speaker 1: with Australian author and regular contributor to both The Monthly
Speaker 1: and to the Saturday Paper, James Bradley. As always, Michael
Speaker 1: is here to tell me a bit more about the
Speaker 1: episode him Michael Ruby Jones. Hello, So, Michael, I wanted
Speaker 1: to start by asking you a bit of a big question.
Speaker 1: In times like this, times of global disquiet, when the
Speaker 1: world feels like it's in a state of crisis, how
Speaker 1: do you carve out time to read fiction?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Ruby, that is more or less the question. It's
Speaker 2: the one I think about all the time. It's very
Speaker 2: hard not to occasionally worry that stories, even powerful, brilliant, angry, engaged,
Speaker 2: stories that actively grapple with the present moment, are still
Speaker 2: something of an indulgence. You know, people don't change their minds,
Speaker 2: let alone their behavior. The most compelling writing in the
Speaker 2: world still, by and large speaks only to the people
Speaker 2: who are already primed to hear it, you know, like,
Speaker 2: let's face it, how's a beautiful poem, or even an
Speaker 2: incisive essay or a gripping page turner of a novel
Speaker 2: any more than a flight of fancy. But I believe
Speaker 2: that without great writing, without great reading, we're completely lost.
Speaker 2: Books remind us of our humanity. They show us the truth.
Speaker 2: They allow us the opportunity to conceive of an alternative
Speaker 2: to the worst of times out there. To read is
Speaker 2: to imagine and dream and empathize with others, if that's
Speaker 2: not all too high minded. And a writer like James Bradley,
Speaker 2: who on this occasion is writing a crime novel, is
Speaker 2: someone who clearly grapples with these questions in the question
Speaker 2: of producing work, not only overcoming kind of the anxiety
Speaker 2: of self doubt or creative purpose or whatever. But why
Speaker 2: does this matter now? Why should people give over the
Speaker 2: time to read this book now? And James Bradley is
Speaker 2: a writer who does that in spades. He's an incredible journalist.
Speaker 2: He writes some amazing science writing. He brought out a
Speaker 2: book last year called deep Water, which was a kind
Speaker 2: of book length essay about their Oceans is really kind
Speaker 2: of terrific and thoughtful. But if James Bradley says it's
Speaker 2: time to read a crime novel, I'm inclined to listen.
Speaker 1: And James Bradley is one of those authors that doesn't
Speaker 1: shy away from the more complicated issues that face us today,
Speaker 1: and this is especially true of his latest novel, Landfall.
Speaker 2: Right Yeah, So, Landfall's a crime novel that is set
Speaker 2: in this volatile, climate destroyed future version of Sydney where
Speaker 2: rising numbers of displaced people and refugees alongside rising sea
Speaker 2: levels have created a world on the edge. So against
Speaker 2: his backdrop, he has a missing girl and as is
Speaker 2: the tradition and in person stories, in crime, time is
Speaker 2: running out, a sensation that is only heightened by the
Speaker 2: sense that it's happening on a planet and in a
Speaker 2: city where time is running out in a range of ways.
Speaker 2: You know, how do you keep people safe? And that's
Speaker 2: the thing. It's not only a gripping read, but it's
Speaker 2: one that's grappling with themes and issues that are at
Speaker 2: the forefront of collective consciousness. James Bradley knows what he's
Speaker 2: doing and he really knocks this one out of the Park.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment, James Bradley thinks kindness
Speaker 1: is a superpower.
Speaker 2: I wanted to start with the crime genre beats of landfall,
Speaker 2: rather than the climate or the speculative stuff. I wanted
Speaker 2: to start with crime, and I wanted to ask you
Speaker 2: whether you're a big reader of crime fiction.
Speaker 3: I am a reader of crime fiction, and I'm a
Speaker 3: real admirer of it. I mean, I think that the
Speaker 3: best of it is really I mean, it's really powerful writing,
Speaker 3: but it has a kind of capacity to, I guess,
Speaker 3: dive into the kind of fault lines both in societies
Speaker 3: and in human beings, which I think is really really interesting,
Speaker 3: and it's one of the things I really wanted to
Speaker 3: use when it came to this because seemed to me
Speaker 3: a really interesting way of thinking about the world I
Speaker 3: was trying to write about. But the only these things
Speaker 3: I love about crime is it's an incredibly elastic genre.
Speaker 3: So it's one of these kind of genres. It's incredibly various.
Speaker 3: People use it to do all sorts of things, but
Speaker 3: there's always that kind of social commentary kind of sitting
Speaker 3: at the heart of the stuff that I find a
Speaker 3: really interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I think that's something I like about it
Speaker 2: to I remember in an old interview aar rank And
Speaker 2: talking about being able to take his character from a
Speaker 2: mansion or an opening gala in one scene to a
Speaker 2: commission flab in the next scene and not being incongruous
Speaker 2: when you're writing in crime, that you actually get the
Speaker 2: chance to cut through that cross section of a society
Speaker 2: in ways that are really useful.
Speaker 3: And yes, and then that is exactly what I wanted
Speaker 3: this to be able to do. So I wanted to
Speaker 3: write a book which kind of put a larger society
Speaker 3: at the center of it, which also allowed you to
Speaker 3: go from you know, the world of the rich to
Speaker 3: the world of the very poor, from the world of
Speaker 3: displaced to the world of the people who are doing
Speaker 3: really well, and also to kind of pull in stories
Speaker 3: because one of the great things about crime is it's
Speaker 3: not just diving into kind of the social worlds, it's
Speaker 3: diving into kind of people's psychology in a really deep
Speaker 3: kind of way. I mean, there's that wonderful line which
Speaker 3: I thought was Chandler, but I must say I looked
Speaker 3: up recently and I couldn't find it. But this person
Speaker 3: who may have been Chandler talked about, you know, crime
Speaker 3: being the poetry of the city, and I kind of
Speaker 3: always loved that idea.
Speaker 2: There is also something about the police procedure, or the
Speaker 2: category into which your book falls that is also you know,
Speaker 2: there's something about the psychology of people who are responsible
Speaker 2: for implementing the social strictures of the day. And increasingly,
Speaker 2: you know, as we've seen, the crime genre have to
Speaker 2: adapt to perhaps a more complex understanding of the challenges
Speaker 2: of modern policing and the ways in which it goes wrong.
Speaker 2: By having a protagonist whose job is to enforce the
Speaker 2: status quo, you manage to bring in tremendous complexity.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and there was actually something I thought about a
Speaker 3: lot when I was writing it. I mean, I did
Speaker 3: worry a little bit about kind of inhabiting that side
Speaker 3: of the argument. I mean that kind of sense that
Speaker 3: you know, you wonder about the kind of ethics of
Speaker 3: writing from somebody you know who's a cop basically. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, as you say, there is a
Speaker 3: kind of complexity that brings to bear and I think
Speaker 3: that's absolutely present in the novel. I mean, one of
Speaker 3: the things that the novel does is the main character,
Speaker 3: someone who has ended up on the wrong side of
Speaker 3: a whole series of those questions. You know, she's been
Speaker 3: the subject of harassment, she has gotten herself into trouble
Speaker 3: with other officers, and is someone who is very aware
Speaker 3: of the clim deficiencies I guess of the organization that
Speaker 3: she works for and the kinds of work that she does,
Speaker 3: but also wants to do the right thing.
Speaker 2: How conscious are you when writing into a genre space
Speaker 2: of how useful the familiar or expected beats are that
Speaker 2: you can get away with certain shorthands or certain things
Speaker 2: because you know that a readership is well conditioned in
Speaker 2: the conventions into which you're writing. I'm thinking, for example,
Speaker 2: you know your protagonist has a new partner who she's
Speaker 2: meeting for the first time at the start of the book.
Speaker 2: That's such a classic crime genre trope that rather than
Speaker 2: an established partnership, you get their unease and the distrust
Speaker 2: and the working out can they be a team or
Speaker 2: are they going to be at odds? Is that part
Speaker 2: of the fun of writing into genre to be able
Speaker 2: to go, Okay, I know what these beats look like,
Speaker 2: and then I can subvert them or embrace them as
Speaker 2: I see fit.
Speaker 3: I think people often think about genre as a kind
Speaker 3: of box that you put things into, and I never
Speaker 3: see it like that. I always see genre as a
Speaker 3: kind of toolkit, you know, that you can kind of say, look,
Speaker 3: here's this thing that will be really interesting, here's this
Speaker 3: thing that will be really useful for the kind of
Speaker 3: story that I want to tell, and then you can
Speaker 3: take that and use it. You know. You talk about
Speaker 3: those kind of established beats, but one of the things
Speaker 3: that those beats do is they let readers understand what
Speaker 3: kind of story it is. You know, They kind of,
Speaker 3: as you say, they do quite a lot of the
Speaker 3: work for you immediately, and there is something very pleasurable
Speaker 3: about hitting those beats that kind of sense there's this
Speaker 3: kind of sturdy genre of shape there that you're working
Speaker 3: with that will take you somewhere, which can also then
Speaker 3: subvert and play with in different kinds of ways, you know.
Speaker 3: And I find I actually find that, as you say,
Speaker 3: really enjoyable about being able to say, look, this is
Speaker 3: going to work like this, because I know that that
Speaker 3: kind of thing works.
Speaker 2: It seems to me one of the underpinning things of
Speaker 2: crime fiction is a crime occurs. In the case of
Speaker 2: this book, a child goes missing, and that's a disruption
Speaker 2: to the natural order of things. And so then what
Speaker 2: we want is detective protagonist to somehow restore peace and
Speaker 2: restore harmony and let the world keep ticking over without
Speaker 2: this fracture of this terrible act. But of course, if
Speaker 2: you set your crime novel in a climate apocalyptic future
Speaker 2: where the natural order is already completely destroyed, completely disturbed
Speaker 2: as a reader, that immediately unsettles. We're not restoring the
Speaker 2: status quo. We're just trying to hang on to whatever
Speaker 2: can be left.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of encapsulating
Speaker 3: what the book's trying to do. I mean, what I
Speaker 3: wanted to do was to kind of push those things
Speaker 3: up against each other. That sense that you have a
Speaker 3: world that is profoundly out of balance already, and then
Speaker 3: this other thing happens in it. There's not a sense
Speaker 3: that world can get put back together. I mean, one
Speaker 3: of things I found really interesting about writing it was
Speaker 3: when I wrote Clade, which is probably you know, it's
Speaker 3: probably nearly fifteen years ago now, there wasn't much fiction
Speaker 3: in that kind of climate space, and one of the
Speaker 3: things I was doing, quite self consciously was trying to
Speaker 3: work out what kind of story you could tell that
Speaker 3: would let you talk about climate, because climate is such
Speaker 3: an amorphous and difficult thing to kind of write about.
Speaker 3: You know, the tools of the novelists are essentially kind
Speaker 3: of social tools around character and setting and things like that,
Speaker 3: and climate doesn't resolve into those things. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a kind of global messy thing. And you know, I
Speaker 3: came up with a kind of series of solutions to
Speaker 3: that problem, which were about kind of as I think
Speaker 3: other people did, about kind of developing different sorts of
Speaker 3: narrative shapes that could kind of hold that story. And
Speaker 3: what's kind of fascinating to me, is it ten years
Speaker 3: down the track you can say it none to write
Speaker 3: a crime story in that space, Like there's something about
Speaker 3: that sense that that space has altered, that the world
Speaker 3: has altered around us in ways it emidst telling stories
Speaker 3: in that space that are in a sense more conventionally shaped,
Speaker 3: but which don't fear you'll you know, climate's a really
Speaker 3: big part of this novel. It's kind of right at
Speaker 3: the center of it. But in a sense, it's not
Speaker 3: the subject of the novel. It's the context of the novel.
Speaker 3: It's the world of the novel lives in, And I
Speaker 3: guess there's something really interesting to me about the way
Speaker 3: that we've gone from having to develop these shapes to
Speaker 3: be able to just position it within our world. That
Speaker 3: says something about how much the kind of process of
Speaker 3: climate change has moved over that decade or decade and
Speaker 3: a half.
Speaker 2: You talked about the ways in which the context, the timing,
Speaker 2: the place, the geopolitical and climate realities of this book
Speaker 2: are not the subject, but they're the world. Tell me
Speaker 2: how much world building you did before you dropped your
Speaker 2: story into the middle of it. Did you begin with
Speaker 2: an idea? Did you begin because I know you're a
Speaker 2: great reader and writer of science journalism of different sorts.
Speaker 2: Did you project a particular path for the world before
Speaker 2: you started telling the story or did that kind of
Speaker 2: become clearly as he went along.
Speaker 3: Look, I think that both, to be honest. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think my initial idea was that I wanted to
Speaker 3: find a way of writing something which put kind of
Speaker 3: climate migration at the center. Like I'd already written several
Speaker 3: books with kind of climate in them, but I wanted
Speaker 3: one that was more explicitly engaged with kind of questions
Speaker 3: of justice and questions of dislocation and you know, refugees,
Speaker 3: those kinds of issues. And I guess what I thought
Speaker 3: to myself was something along the lines of it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's maybe a generation from now, thirty years And then
Speaker 3: I thought, so, what's happened? It's much hotter, and water,
Speaker 3: I knew was a really big part of the novel.
Speaker 3: I wanted that sense of rising water, of rain or flooding,
Speaker 3: of all of those kinds of things kind of intruding
Speaker 3: into the book. I also generally have a view that
Speaker 3: with this kind of fiction, you don't want to put
Speaker 3: that stuff at the center. I mean, generally, we don't
Speaker 3: talk about the things that are the fabric of our world.
Speaker 3: They're just there, you know. We don't talk about the
Speaker 3: phones that we carry around. We don't talk about the weather,
Speaker 3: you know, like it's just part of the fabric of
Speaker 3: the world. So what I wanted to do was have
Speaker 3: that sense that you're in a world and then you
Speaker 3: kind of glimpse the structure of it in the background.
Speaker 2: I guess when we return, James discusses the creation of
Speaker 2: his lead characters and reveals by kindness is so important
Speaker 2: both in his novel and in the world. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. I want to get to your protagonist and
Speaker 2: her family in a moment, but before we get to them,
Speaker 2: i'd love it if you could talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about Tassin as a character, because he's incredibly important to
Speaker 2: the book and is very resonant with a number of
Speaker 2: your previous novels. He's the kind of character that I
Speaker 2: think of as a quintessentially James Bradley's creation.
Speaker 3: Oh that's really interesting. So to see Hm as a
Speaker 3: young Indonesian guy. He's about sixteen, and he has left
Speaker 3: Indonesia because Indonesia is a complete disaster. You know, there
Speaker 3: are storms, there are heat waves, and his mother and
Speaker 3: his sister dying one of these heat waves, and so
Speaker 3: he kind of makes his way to Australia on a
Speaker 3: boat and ends up in detention and then eventually leaves
Speaker 3: detention and in the course of the novel finds himself
Speaker 3: stumbling across this crime as it happens and is trying
Speaker 3: to find the missing girl at the same time as
Speaker 3: the as the detective is, and he is he's a
Speaker 3: character I felt a lot of kind of affection for
Speaker 3: He's this bright, kind kid who's trying to get by,
Speaker 3: but is also bearing this kind of massive wave of trauma.
Speaker 3: His story in any ways, carries a lot of the
Speaker 3: kind of thematic weight of the novel. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: because although he is now in this city that's half flooded,
Speaker 3: you know, he's kind of bearing that stuff around, but
Speaker 3: he has this goodness about him. You know, he's someone
Speaker 3: who is actually trying to do this thing, trying to
Speaker 3: find this kid, and not because he has to do it,
Speaker 3: because he thinks he needs to, you know, in a
Speaker 3: world that has not helped him to.
Speaker 2: Sim embodies that sense of common humanity in the face
Speaker 2: of kind of no reason to maintain faith in those things,
Speaker 2: no reason to feel a responsibility to them or to
Speaker 2: be driven by that in any way. And yet he
Speaker 2: just almost unthinkingly identifies a space where he's required to help,
Speaker 2: and he puts himself into that role. And I think
Speaker 2: in a story set against climate catastrophe, that's kind of
Speaker 2: the human question is how does a single missing child,
Speaker 2: How does a small scale, in many ways small scale
Speaker 2: crime story have weight in the context of global disaster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean, in fact, that sense of kindness
Speaker 3: of doing the right thing is really kind of central
Speaker 3: to the novel. I mean, it's a novel that at
Speaker 3: one level is quite bleak, you know. I mean it's
Speaker 3: set in this kind of ruined world, but you have
Speaker 3: people in it trying to do the right thing, and
Speaker 3: there are kind of random acts of kindness at various
Speaker 3: points in the book. And I actually think that's really important.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that we we live in a
Speaker 3: world which does a series of things. One of them
Speaker 3: is that it tells us that in bad situations, people
Speaker 3: behave badly, and in fact, the evidence is that that's
Speaker 3: not the case. I mean, you only have to look
Speaker 3: at what happened up in the floods a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago, the Northern Rivers, you know, the government failed
Speaker 3: to turn up, and people went out in their tinees
Speaker 3: and kind of rescued their neighbors and looked after each other.
Speaker 3: But also because I I think we live in a
Speaker 3: cultural moment where there is this notion that somehow kindness
Speaker 3: is weakness and that cruelty is strength, I think actually
Speaker 3: pushing back on that's really really important because I don't
Speaker 3: think that's true at all. I mean, I actually think
Speaker 3: kindness is a kind of superpower.
Speaker 2: I think one of the key tools in any novel.
Speaker 2: But in this novel, you're protagonist, Senior Detective Azad Sada,
Speaker 2: and in particular, I'm thinking about her relationship with her father, AmAm,
Speaker 2: which is incredibly moving, and Amaan is in a rapidly
Speaker 2: deteriorating state, suffering from dementia, and so you have this
Speaker 2: kind of very real illustration of that sense of loss,
Speaker 2: that sense of things slipping away, and that sense of
Speaker 2: not being at home in this new reality. Can you
Speaker 2: talk a bit about your conception of Sada and her
Speaker 2: relationship with her father at the heart of this book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting you say that about him, because one
Speaker 3: of the things I very much wanted Aman to be
Speaker 3: is he's someone who's kind of losing his memory, and
Speaker 3: he is a literal example of this sense of the
Speaker 3: slipping away of a kind of past, that kind of
Speaker 3: sense that you're now lost in this new reality. So
Speaker 3: she is the studio, is the daughter of an Australian
Speaker 3: mother and of Aman, who's a Bangladeshi. She was born
Speaker 3: in Bangladesh. They came to Australia after the melt where
Speaker 3: there's this kind of catastrophic rise in sea levels after
Speaker 3: lots of Antarctica collapses, and she's kind of grown up here,
Speaker 3: but she, in the same way that Tasimas is carrying
Speaker 3: a lot of trauma and a lot of past, and
Speaker 3: the two of them are together in this quite complicated
Speaker 3: kind of way. She's now caring for him. They've clearly
Speaker 3: had quite a complicated relationship over the years. But that
Speaker 3: sense of her trying to juggle, trying to juggle these
Speaker 3: two things, trying to juggle this kind of job as
Speaker 3: a police detective and this job of caring for someone
Speaker 3: who's in such a such a difficult state, is something
Speaker 3: that I felt I really wanted for her, that kind
Speaker 3: of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple
Speaker 3: directions at once.
Speaker 2: Before I let you go, I have to ask the
Speaker 2: ways in which the climate elements of this imagined future playout.
Speaker 2: Please tell me they're entirely imagine and not the basis
Speaker 2: of kind of very credible research you've done in a
Speaker 2: likely scenario for five years, ten years. Hence, James Bradley,
Speaker 2: tell me you made loll up. Tell me it's all pretend.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that the world of the book
Speaker 3: is a kind of extrapolation from where we are, it's
Speaker 3: not a particularly unreasonable one. I don't think. I think,
Speaker 3: on the track that we're on, it's a pretty reasonable one.
Speaker 3: At the moment. I thought a lot over the last
Speaker 3: you know, year or two about where we are with climate,
Speaker 3: and if you'd ask me ten years ago, I would
Speaker 3: have said that I thought that there will come a
Speaker 3: moment where the dissonance between what's happening in our lack
Speaker 3: of action will become so great that there'll be a
Speaker 3: kind of shift in public sentiment, that we will move
Speaker 3: from denial to panic. And I don't know that I
Speaker 3: think that's true anymore. I mean, I think half of
Speaker 3: LA burned down a few months ago and people looked
Speaker 3: at it and said that's because of diversity policies in
Speaker 3: the LA Fire Department. So that kind of sense that
Speaker 3: there's going to be this kind of sea change in opinion,
Speaker 3: I don't think that's there. And I mean I look
Speaker 3: at our political leadership in Australia and it's profound lack
Speaker 3: of action on a series of things that are happening.
Speaker 3: You know, we're still opening fossil fuel projects. You know,
Speaker 3: we're still I mean in Sydney around the corner. For me,
Speaker 3: there's a new block of Flatch, which one of the
Speaker 3: advertisements for it, you know, boasts that it's got gas
Speaker 3: connections all through it. I mean this kind of sense
Speaker 3: that we're not even doing the kind of basic stuff
Speaker 3: that we need to do, and I think increasingly for
Speaker 3: the lesson we need to take from that is that
Speaker 3: you know, nobody is coming to save us. You know,
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, it's actually up to us.
Speaker 3: Our governments are not going to save us, and this
Speaker 3: kind of handing over of responsibility to other people can't continue.
Speaker 3: Like we actually have to start saying to ourselves, they're
Speaker 3: not going to save us, these guys are actually the problem,
Speaker 3: and start asking some hard questions about what we do
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 2: James Bradley's latest novel, Landfall, is available at all good
Speaker 2: bookstores now, and a reminder that work of nonfiction from
Speaker 2: last year is called deep Water.
Speaker 3: It's also terrific.
Speaker 2: I recommend you get both.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. We'll be back next Sunday with more
Speaker 1: from Rackel. As always, if you want to dive further
Speaker 1: into the show, you can search for it Wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts, there are more than eighty episodes in
Speaker 1: the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
Speaker 1: next week.