Grief, guilt, and grace on Tasmania's brutal coastline

I came to Jane Harper’s latest novel, The Survivors, with a heavy bias. The Dry and The Lost Man, both deeply character-driven works of Australian rural noir, had made a great impression on me, cementing Harper in my mind as one of the country’s best — and even making me think I might actually like the crime genre. All of which meant that a) I knew I would buy anything written by this literary lady, and b) The Survivors would have to live up to the greatest of expectations.

And dammit, it did.

It took a moment to hook me, but once I was in, I was all in. Just as with her previous books, The Survivors is steeped in atmosphere, imbued with a kind of internal loneliness that shadows the sheer force of Australia’s echoing landscape. In a departure from the arid expanses of Australia’s centre found in The Dry and The Lost Man, The Survivors is set much further south, in coastal Tasmania, and perhaps it’s just the artistry of the cover design, but it felt as if I were reading this one through a shivering haze of green and grey salt spray.

The story is one of homecoming and uncertainty. 30-year-old Kieran Elliott is back in his hometown, a place that hasn’t belonged to him since a series of devastating events twelve years earlier. But Kieran’s father is deteriorating as dementia sets in, so Kieran has returned to Evelyn Bay, bringing with him his girlfriend Mia and their baby daughter, Audrey. The tiny seaside community is haunted by tragedy in a grief that is tangible and weighted, infused in Kieran’s every interaction with his parents and the locals. Mostly, everyone just wants to put behind them what happened all those years ago, but the coastline itself is a constant reminder of the power of the elements and the frailty of human life, as well as secrets not yet revealed.

Amid the tensions and all the unspoken words, a new horror unfolds, forcing the people of Evelyn Bay to confront the darkness they’ve been avoiding for years. As fresh wounds are laid bare, old trauma is reopened, leading to revelations that will undo some relationships and repair others.

In true Jane Harper style, the mystery is the skeleton of this novel, but it’s her characterisation and sense of setting that put living flesh onto the bones. Harper writes genuine people, people grappling with their humanity, their sins, their hopes, and their pasts. The beating heart of this story is its complex consideration of grief and guilt and grace, an exploration of how trauma can shape the development of soul and mind, and the sinuous path to healing.

Along the way, there are also some excellent observations about the world we live in and, in particular, the vast gulf between what constitutes freedom and safety for women versus the same for men. A couple of these moments felt a little heavy-handed, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself from nodding along: yes, yes, that’s exactly how it is. These little moments felt somewhat like an intrusion of the author, but at the same time they were so spot-on that I can’t condemn them in any way.

The words crime and thriller feel far too simplistic to describe the mastery of The Survivors. Queen Jane Harper has excelled again.

The Survivors
by Jane Harper
Published September 2020 by Macmillan Australia
377 pages