Books

James Bradley
Landfall

James Bradley has a profound way with words. Not merely a fancy proficiency but the kind of stillness that accompanies revealing conversations, one on one, late at night.

That goes for his major works of nonfiction, such as Dark Water, last year’s eye-opening study of recent and ongoing exploration of the sunless ocean depths, as much as for his long-form journalism, such as the very personal study of the psychiatric use of illegal psychedelics that was published in The Monthly in 2021. His writing shifts readers’ perspectives.

Writing fiction and nonfiction in long and short forms, he was best known for his novels before the explosion of Deep Water onto the scene. The novels are futuristic, set just far enough into the future to make the technology and the environmental and social changes described plausible while still making the outcomes deeply unsettling. Climate is his underlying preoccupation and, along with his moral examination of humanity’s misguided directions, underlies each narrative in a different way.

The immense subject of humanity-driven climate change was funnelled into a manageable thread through a family’s generations, descendants of a climatologist emblematically named Adam, in 2015’s Clade. Bioethics took over in 2020’s Ghost Species, in which scientists stepped beyond cloning animals and began reviving extinct species. In this book, a Neanderthal person is controversially re-created in a test tube, with a range of ethical challenges, including the personal relationship between another emblematically named character, the child Eve, and the scientist who made and raised her.

Bradley’s new novel, Landfall, continues his fixation with climate but is also a departure: his first crime story. It is set a mere 30 years into the future, beyond a climatic apocalypse, at a point of no return. Sydney is still recognisable beneath the inevitable disfigurement of global warming. Temperatures and humidity are suffocatingly high. Coastal waters have risen beyond the “Floodline”. Deserted buildings with dry upper floors and shanty towns on the slightest rises are populated by the desperately poor, who run physical risks every time a cyclone or other weather crisis occurs. Rich people have escaped inland or at least to high points in the hilly city.

The central characters are Sadiya Azad, a detective, and her sidekick Paul Findlay, who become deeply involved in a new investigation. They both bring emotional baggage to the case and won’t let it go, even when their superiors demand it. Azad survived the sinking of an asylum-seeking boat journey to Australia with her father when she was a child. Her mother and sister drowned in the incident and she survived not only the tragedy itself but also her father’s emotional shutdown. She has grown up alone to all intents and purposes, self-organising and tough, and is now caring for her dementia-challenged father.

Many of the residents beyond the Floodline are foreigners who have fled low-lying countries. Racial tensions have risen, combining with rising class tensions. The tech developments are believable: Azad’s “Assistant” is an AI device that constantly accompanies her via a wearable lens.

When the story opens, five-year-old Casey Mitchell, an only child, goes missing while playing outside with the kids next door. In a community deeply suspicious of the police, Azad and Findlay find few leads. Adding to the sense of urgency that always accompanies the search for missing children, a category 5 cyclone is bearing down on them. Police and other emergency services, businesses and residents are focused on locking down. The deadline for finding Casey is tightening.

Casey’s parents and neighbours are rough and aggressive. When a local big business executive is murdered – a developer, symbolically – and a homeless immigrant boy is seen fleetingly nearby, the events seem to have a tenuous link with Azad and Findlay’s investigation. They pursue the nebulous path, lacking anything more concrete. And, as the saying goes, the plot thickens.

It thickens slowly, mirroring the languidness of the weather. The dialogue is repetitive, which might be annoying at first, though this reader soon settled in. We do talk that way during heatwaves: a mantra, eyes rolling, of “God, it’s hot!” The repetitive dialogue of the investigation is also realistic, although novelists usually avoid that reality. Any team delving deep – certainly journalists and presumably police, too – is constantly reprising how far they have got.

Bradley’s descriptions of the heat are affecting. One can taste that lousy sensation of lukewarm water when ice-cold is craved and feel the damp stickiness of clothing on sweaty skin. The fluidity of Bradley’s running commentary on the characters’ anxiety-driven thinking suggests he himself has known it, and the internal monologues of Azad’s senile father are heart-rending. The deadline of the cyclone’s arrival is a powerful metaphor for the approach of global warming.

Bradley once told an interviewer why readers will always find hope in his “cli-fi” novels. “[D]espair is self-fulfilling,” he said. “Nothing we do now can change a lot of what’s coming – there’s too much warming already locked in for that. But at the end of the day, I think there’s a big difference between saving half the coral reefs and saving none of them, or holding sea-level rises to a metre instead of six or 10, or temperature rises to two degrees instead of four or six.”

It’s a comforting sentiment but, with Landfall, he seems to be running out of optimism. For the few days it covers, the book is long, slow, gloomy and suffocating. It is also as propulsive and thought-provoking as his previous works.

Penguin, 336pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 10, 2025 as "Landfall".

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