James Bradley’s new novel subverts the classic crime-solving trope

Landfall
James Bradley
Penguin, $34.99

The progress of Tropical Cyclone Alfred towards landfall across south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales prompted warnings and evacuations in areas not typically in the direct path of such severe weather. As communities in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers braced for impact, I switched between scrolling news reports and social media updates on Alfred, and reading James Bradley’s remarkably prescient novel, Landfall.

The third instalment in his critically acclaimed climate fiction series, Landfall builds on the themes of its predecessors, Clade and Ghost Species, along with Bradley’s “climate project” —long and short fiction for adults and young people, essays, journalism and non-fiction books — all centred on exploring the impacts and possible remedies to the human-induced climate crisis. While no stranger to writing eco-thrillers, this time Bradley flips the well-loved Australian trope of the missing child by transporting it from its cliched bush setting into a post-climate-apocalypse Sydney, producing a genre mash-up of cli-fi and detective fiction.

‘The Melt’ — a tipping point climate event — has seen the great Antarctic ice sheets crash into the ocean, sending water levels rising across the world. The Sydney of Landfall is a world inhabited by characters whose lives are irreparably transformed by climate catastrophe, a city whose flooded streets, scorchingly hot suburbs, and social divides, are both alien and unsettlingly familiar.

When five-year-old Casey Mitchell goes missing, suspected abducted, Senior Detective Sadiya Azad and her partner Detective Sargeant Paul Findlay, are dispatched to the city’s margins to investigate the case. The ‘Floodline’, a series of half-submerged houses and apartments strung together with makeshift duckboards and pontoons, is home to Casey’s mother, Emma and stepfather, Jay, who immediately becomes a suspect based on his social media links to white supremacist groups.

Bradley furnishes the novel with the requisite cast of shady characters to question and eliminate: a convicted paedophile lurking around the scene of the girl’s disappearance, the head honcho of an exploitative corporation having an illicit love affair, an ex-junkie relative of a person of interest, and various other crooks and rogues operating in a web of corruption who round out the whodunit. When the body of a seemingly unrelated woman turns up in the boot of a burnt-out car, the case becomes curiouser and curiouser.

In Landfall, environmental devastation is not merely a backdrop to the action; it is a central character and driving narrative. The police investigation into Casey’s disappearance is hindered by the everyday reality of living with the extreme heat and inundation of a coastal city on the brink of societal collapse. The novel’s chapters are titled by days of the week, running Monday through Friday. Each passing day builds the urgency of finding the girl and is amplified by the impending landfall of Nasreem, “a massive cyclone …building over the Pacific”, which is expected to be unprecedented in scale and devastation.

Bradley’s world-building in this speculative novel is never heavy-handed. Future tech feels near-at-hand: drones collecting footage of protesters, AI assistants and AR lenses, a failing power grid, and street cooling, while the tumultuous world of crop failures, fires, floods and hurricanes is an all too foreseeable future, “created decades before catching up with the world”.