May 10, 2025 • 21 mins
In addition to being an established novelist, James Bradley is also a journalist and writer of non-fiction, much of it concerned with the natural world and the myriad threats it faces. Set in the near future, in a world that is in the grips of climate catastrophe, his latest novel, Landfall, is a crime thriller at its heart. On this episode of Read This, Michael and James discuss what it means to write into a specific genre and why kindness is so important in both this novel and the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:21):
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
(00:43):
do you carve out time to read fiction?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
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,
(01:07):
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.
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:24):
doing and he really knocks this one out of the Park.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Coming up in just a moment, James Bradley thinks kindness
is a superpower.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
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
(04:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:54):
I see fit.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
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
(08:19):
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,
(08:39):
really enjoyable about being able to say, look, this is
going to work like this, because I know that that
kind of thing works.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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
(09:08):
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
(09:28):
can be left.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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
(09:49):
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.
(10:13):
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
(10:36):
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,
(10:58):
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
(11:19):
says something about how much the kind of process of
climate change has moved over that decade or decade and
a half.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
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.
(11:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
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,
(12:28):
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,
(12:50):
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,
(13:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
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,
(15:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
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.
(16:33):
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
(16:55):
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
(17:16):
kindness is a kind of superpower.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
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
(17:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:05):
of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple
directions at once.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:13):
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,
(20:36):
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,
(20:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
It's also terrific.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I recommend you get both.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
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.
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
(00:21):
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
(00:43):
do you carve out time to read fiction?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
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,
(01:07):
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.
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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.
(02:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:24):
doing and he really knocks this one out of the Park.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Coming up in just a moment, James Bradley thinks kindness
is a superpower.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
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
(04:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:54):
I see fit.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
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
(08:19):
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,
(08:39):
really enjoyable about being able to say, look, this is
going to work like this, because I know that that
kind of thing works.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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
(09:08):
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
(09:28):
can be left.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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
(09:49):
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.
(10:13):
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
(10:36):
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,
(10:58):
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
(11:19):
says something about how much the kind of process of
climate change has moved over that decade or decade and
a half.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
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.
(11:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
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,
(12:28):
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,
(12:50):
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,
(13:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
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,
(15:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
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.
(16:33):
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
(16:55):
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
(17:16):
kindness is a kind of superpower.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
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
(17:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:05):
of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple
directions at once.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:13):
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,
(20:36):
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,
(20:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
It's also terrific.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I recommend you get both.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
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.
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