April 23, 2025 • 24 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. This week, 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.
Reading list:
Clade, James Bradley, 2015
Ghost Species, James Bradley, 2020
Deep Water, James Bradley, 2024
Landfall, James Bradley, 2025
Highway 13, Fiona McFarlane, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: James Bradley
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm a big fan of the stand up comic John Mulaney,
very funny man. And there's a bit from his twenty
eighteen show Kid Gorgeous that I think about a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Yeah. One day, well it doesn't matter why, but I
was sitting in a gazebo and there was a plaque
on the gazebo and it said this gazebo was built
by the town in eighteen sixty three, that is, in
the middle of the Civil War, and the whole town
(00:32):
built a gazebo. What was that town meeting?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Like?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Like, all right, everyone, first order of business. We have
all the telegrams from Gettysburg with the war dead. Let's
see here. Okay, everyone's husband and brother and everyone died. Okay, Josiah,
you had something, Yes I do. How'd you like to
be indoors and out of doors all at once?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
May I introduce you too? And my condolence is again
to everyone the gazebo.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Building a gazebo during the Civil War classic. So here's
the thing. I believe in the power and necessity of writing,
of course I do. I'm devoted to that idea in
various forms. But there are times when the world is
particularly egregiously in a state of crisis, where this mounting
sense of anxious futility takes hold, war and political venality
(01:24):
and corporate greed and human misery at all sides. And
that's not even to get into the climate emergency, the
all too real possibility that this is all getting worse
at an unsustainable pace. Sorry, not very cheery stuff, but
in the wake of such royal and global disquiet, it's
hard not to occasionally worry that stories, even powerful, brilliant, angry,
(01:48):
engage stories that grapple directly with the present moment. These
stories are just a distraction. They are an indulgence. 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.
How is a beautiful poem, or an incisive essay, or
(02:09):
a gripping page turner of a novel, not just building
a gazebo in the Civil war. But without great writing,
without great reading, we are lost. Our literature reminds us
of our humanity, It shows us truths and allows us
to conceive of an alternative to the worst of times.
To read is to imagine and dream and empathize with others.
(02:33):
We read because to read is to live, and the
thing is the best Writers grapple every day with the
above conundrum. Amongst the challenges of self belief and motivation,
of drive and conviction, writers are asking all the time
why the thing they write matters, and why it needs
to be written and deserves to be read. James Bradley
(02:56):
is a terrific journalist and writer of nonfiction, much of
a concerned with the natural world and the myriad threats
it faces. He brought out a book last year called
deep Water that was this book length essay about the ocean.
I cannot recommend it highly enough. As well as his
science journalism, he's a formidable literary critic and the author
(03:17):
of seven novels and a book of poetry. When James
Bradley decides the story is worth telling, you're in no
doubt He's thought long and hard about why. His latest
is called Landfall, and It's a crime novel said in
a volatile climate destroyed future vision of Sydney, where rising
numbers of displaced people and refugees and rising sea levels
(03:39):
have created a world on the edge against this backdrop,
a young girl has gone missing and time is running
out to find her and keep her safe. The world
is in crisis. Thank god, there's something to read. I'm
Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show about
the books we love and the stories behind them. I
(04:04):
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 (04:19):
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
(04:42):
use when it came to this, because it 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 1 (05:03):
Yeah, No, I think that's something I like about it
to I remember in an old interview I 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 (05:24):
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 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
(05:45):
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 find it.
But this person who may been Chandler talked about, you know,
crime being the poetry of the city, and I kind
(06:06):
of always loved that idea.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
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
(06:31):
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 (06:41):
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
(07:02):
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
of 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
(07:23):
aware of the kind of 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 1 (07:32):
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
(07:55):
meeting for the first time at the start of the book.
That's such a class see crime genre trope that rather
than an established partnership, you get their unmise 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 farm 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
(08:18):
I see fit.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
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
(08:43):
kind of story it is. You know, they kind of
just 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 you can also then
subvert and play with in different kinds of ways, you know.
And I find I actually find that, as you say,
(09:03):
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 1 (09:11):
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 our detective protagonist to somehow restore peace
and restore harmony and let the world keep ticking over
(09:32):
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
(09:52):
whatever can be left.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
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, and 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,
(10:16):
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.
(10:37):
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 the developing different sorts
(11:01):
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
rite 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 emits telling
stories in that space that are in a sense more
conventionally shaped, but which don't feel you know, climate's a
(11:26):
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
(11:47):
of climate change has moved over that decade or decade
and a half.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
(12:16):
Did you project a particular path for the world before
you started telling the story or did that kind of
become clear to you as you went along?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Look, I think 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
(12:52):
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 and flooding,
(13:14):
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,
(13:38):
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 glimped the structure of it in the background.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I guess when we returned, James discusses the creation of
his lead characters and reveals by kindness is so important
both in his novel and in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Right back, I.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, that's really interesting to seem. 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 die
in one of these heat waves. And so he kind
of makes his way to Australia on a boat and
(14:53):
ends up in detention and then eventually leaves detention and
in the course of the novel finds him self 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
(15:13):
this bright, kind kid who's trying to get by, but
is also bearing this kind of massive weight of trauma.
His story in many 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,
(15:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
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
(16:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
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.
(16:58):
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 tenees
(17:19):
and of rescued their neighbors and looked after each other.
But also because 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
(17:41):
is a kind of superpower.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I think one of the key tools in any novel.
But in this novel, you're a protagonist, Senior Detective Azad Sada,
And in particular, I'm thinking about her relationship with her father, AmAm,
which is incredibly moving and a mum is in a
rapidly deteriorating state, suffering from dementia, and so you have
(18:06):
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 Sadah and her
relationship with her father at the heart of this book.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, it's interesting you say that about him, because one
of the things I very much wanted Amom 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
(18:47):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:30):
of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple
directions at once.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
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 imagined. Are 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. Lol up, tell me it's all pretend.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I mean, I think that the world of the book
is a kind of extrapolation from where we are. It's
not a particularly unre sa one, I don't think. I
think on the track that we're on, it's a pretty
reasonable one at the moment. I've 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
(20:17):
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
(20:37):
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.
(21:00):
Were 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 the
lesson we need to take from that is that, you know,
nobody is coming to save us. You know, at the
(21:21):
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 1 (21:41):
James Bradley's latest novel, Landfall, is available at all good
bookstores now, and I remind that work of nonfiction from
last year is called deep Water. It's also terrific. I
recommend you get both before we go a bit of
(22:05):
recommended further reading, and it's one that I meant to
recommend back at the time, and it somehow passed me by,
but it won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award earlier this year,
and it reminded me that it was worth dredging back
to July twenty twenty four for a really terrific read.
It's another crime ish book by Fiona McFarlane. It's called
(22:25):
Highway thirteen and it's this collection of short stories all
centered around the fallout from a series of backpacker murders
along a stretch of highway. That sounds grim, I know,
but mcfarlan's this gorgeous writer, and what she does with
it is telescope out in time and look at the
various reverberations of a crime and of a story that
(22:47):
captures local and national imagination like that. It's called Highway
thirteen and it's a terrific read. You can find it
and all the other books we mentioned today at your
favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If
you enjoyed, please tell your friends and rate and review us.
It helps a lot. Even the weird review that appeared
(23:07):
on Apple Podcast this week, which appears to be either
selling something or referencing something else. I don't think it's
about our show, but they gave us five stars anyway,
so I'll take it. Next week, I'm read this. I'm
sitting down with Australian writer Josephine Rowe to discuss her
ghostly new novel Little World.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I tend to put things down for a while, put
them in the third or let let them kind of
mature a bit. And I'm a kind of ruthless condenser.
So it's, you know, a very short novel, but I
hope it feels a bit like it's eaten a larger novel,
because that's pretty much the breadth of it in terms
of writing.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Read This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of ar Group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher, Posey mcacky hit Its
our transcripts. Thanks for listening, See you next week.
I'm a big fan of the stand up comic John Mulaney,
very funny man. And there's a bit from his twenty
eighteen show Kid Gorgeous that I think about a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Yeah. One day, well it doesn't matter why, but I
was sitting in a gazebo and there was a plaque
on the gazebo and it said this gazebo was built
by the town in eighteen sixty three, that is, in
the middle of the Civil War, and the whole town
(00:32):
built a gazebo. What was that town meeting?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Like?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Like, all right, everyone, first order of business. We have
all the telegrams from Gettysburg with the war dead. Let's
see here. Okay, everyone's husband and brother and everyone died. Okay, Josiah,
you had something, Yes I do. How'd you like to
be indoors and out of doors all at once?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
May I introduce you too? And my condolence is again
to everyone the gazebo.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Building a gazebo during the Civil War classic. So here's
the thing. I believe in the power and necessity of writing,
of course I do. I'm devoted to that idea in
various forms. But there are times when the world is
particularly egregiously in a state of crisis, where this mounting
sense of anxious futility takes hold, war and political venality
(01:24):
and corporate greed and human misery at all sides. And
that's not even to get into the climate emergency, the
all too real possibility that this is all getting worse
at an unsustainable pace. Sorry, not very cheery stuff, but
in the wake of such royal and global disquiet, it's
hard not to occasionally worry that stories, even powerful, brilliant, angry,
(01:48):
engage stories that grapple directly with the present moment. These
stories are just a distraction. They are an indulgence. 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.
How is a beautiful poem, or an incisive essay, or
(02:09):
a gripping page turner of a novel, not just building
a gazebo in the Civil war. But without great writing,
without great reading, we are lost. Our literature reminds us
of our humanity, It shows us truths and allows us
to conceive of an alternative to the worst of times.
To read is to imagine and dream and empathize with others.
(02:33):
We read because to read is to live, and the
thing is the best Writers grapple every day with the
above conundrum. Amongst the challenges of self belief and motivation,
of drive and conviction, writers are asking all the time
why the thing they write matters, and why it needs
to be written and deserves to be read. James Bradley
(02:56):
is a terrific journalist and writer of nonfiction, much of
a concerned with the natural world and the myriad threats
it faces. He brought out a book last year called
deep Water that was this book length essay about the ocean.
I cannot recommend it highly enough. As well as his
science journalism, he's a formidable literary critic and the author
(03:17):
of seven novels and a book of poetry. When James
Bradley decides the story is worth telling, you're in no
doubt He's thought long and hard about why. His latest
is called Landfall, and It's a crime novel said in
a volatile climate destroyed future vision of Sydney, where rising
numbers of displaced people and refugees and rising sea levels
(03:39):
have created a world on the edge against this backdrop,
a young girl has gone missing and time is running
out to find her and keep her safe. The world
is in crisis. Thank god, there's something to read. I'm
Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show about
the books we love and the stories behind them. I
(04:04):
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 (04:19):
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
(04:42):
use when it came to this, because it 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 1 (05:03):
Yeah, No, I think that's something I like about it
to I remember in an old interview I 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 (05:24):
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 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
(05:45):
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 find it.
But this person who may been Chandler talked about, you know,
crime being the poetry of the city, and I kind
(06:06):
of always loved that idea.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
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
(06:31):
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 (06:41):
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
(07:02):
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
of 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
(07:23):
aware of the kind of 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 1 (07:32):
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
(07:55):
meeting for the first time at the start of the book.
That's such a class see crime genre trope that rather
than an established partnership, you get their unmise 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 farm 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
(08:18):
I see fit.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
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
(08:43):
kind of story it is. You know, they kind of
just 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 you can also then
subvert and play with in different kinds of ways, you know.
And I find I actually find that, as you say,
(09:03):
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 1 (09:11):
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 our detective protagonist to somehow restore peace
and restore harmony and let the world keep ticking over
(09:32):
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
(09:52):
whatever can be left.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
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, and 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,
(10:16):
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.
(10:37):
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 the developing different sorts
(11:01):
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
rite 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 emits telling
stories in that space that are in a sense more
conventionally shaped, but which don't feel you know, climate's a
(11:26):
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
(11:47):
of climate change has moved over that decade or decade
and a half.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
(12:16):
Did you project a particular path for the world before
you started telling the story or did that kind of
become clear to you as you went along?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Look, I think 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
(12:52):
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 and flooding,
(13:14):
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,
(13:38):
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 glimped the structure of it in the background.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I guess when we returned, James discusses the creation of
his lead characters and reveals by kindness is so important
both in his novel and in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Right back, I.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, that's really interesting to seem. 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 die
in one of these heat waves. And so he kind
of makes his way to Australia on a boat and
(14:53):
ends up in detention and then eventually leaves detention and
in the course of the novel finds him self 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
(15:13):
this bright, kind kid who's trying to get by, but
is also bearing this kind of massive weight of trauma.
His story in many 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,
(15:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
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
(16:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
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.
(16:58):
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 tenees
(17:19):
and of rescued their neighbors and looked after each other.
But also because 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
(17:41):
is a kind of superpower.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I think one of the key tools in any novel.
But in this novel, you're a protagonist, Senior Detective Azad Sada,
And in particular, I'm thinking about her relationship with her father, AmAm,
which is incredibly moving and a mum is in a
rapidly deteriorating state, suffering from dementia, and so you have
(18:06):
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 Sadah and her
relationship with her father at the heart of this book.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, it's interesting you say that about him, because one
of the things I very much wanted Amom 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
(18:47):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:30):
of sense that she's someone who's been pulled in multiple
directions at once.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
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 imagined. Are 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. Lol up, tell me it's all pretend.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I mean, I think that the world of the book
is a kind of extrapolation from where we are. It's
not a particularly unre sa one, I don't think. I
think on the track that we're on, it's a pretty
reasonable one at the moment. I've 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
(20:17):
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
(20:37):
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.
(21:00):
Were 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 the
lesson we need to take from that is that, you know,
nobody is coming to save us. You know, at the
(21:21):
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 1 (21:41):
James Bradley's latest novel, Landfall, is available at all good
bookstores now, and I remind that work of nonfiction from
last year is called deep Water. It's also terrific. I
recommend you get both before we go a bit of
(22:05):
recommended further reading, and it's one that I meant to
recommend back at the time, and it somehow passed me by,
but it won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award earlier this year,
and it reminded me that it was worth dredging back
to July twenty twenty four for a really terrific read.
It's another crime ish book by Fiona McFarlane. It's called
(22:25):
Highway thirteen and it's this collection of short stories all
centered around the fallout from a series of backpacker murders
along a stretch of highway. That sounds grim, I know,
but mcfarlan's this gorgeous writer, and what she does with
it is telescope out in time and look at the
various reverberations of a crime and of a story that
(22:47):
captures local and national imagination like that. It's called Highway
thirteen and it's a terrific read. You can find it
and all the other books we mentioned today at your
favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If
you enjoyed, please tell your friends and rate and review us.
It helps a lot. Even the weird review that appeared
(23:07):
on Apple Podcast this week, which appears to be either
selling something or referencing something else. I don't think it's
about our show, but they gave us five stars anyway,
so I'll take it. Next week, I'm read this. I'm
sitting down with Australian writer Josephine Rowe to discuss her
ghostly new novel Little World.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I tend to put things down for a while, put
them in the third or let let them kind of
mature a bit. And I'm a kind of ruthless condenser.
So it's, you know, a very short novel, but I
hope it feels a bit like it's eaten a larger novel,
because that's pretty much the breadth of it in terms
of writing.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Read This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of ar Group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher, Posey mcacky hit Its
our transcripts. Thanks for listening, See you next week.
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