Mobil’s Yarraville terminal has blown sky high. Global warming has wreaked havoc on Melbourne and the inner west is baking.
Footscray author Jane Rawson’s new novel A Wrong Turn at The Office of Unmade Lists finds lead character Caddy camped by the Maribyrnong River, working the black market and living on memories of life before everything went pear-shaped.
Rawson says her debut novel, to be launched next week, is a dystopian fiction set in Melbourne and San Francisco about two decades from now.
“Things have fallen apart. Melbourne’s a giant, sprawling shanty town where rich people are still going OK but everyone else is struggling. The UN has been called in to keep the peace.”
Caddy’s racketeer friend comes across maps that allow him to tunnel all over Melbourne, but he starts falling into a place called The Gap.
The Gap is where things go to be stored, including things you imagine and never quite get around to doing.
This includes the story Caddy has been writing about a couple of children in the US whose parents set them the task of seeing all of America 25 square feet by 25 square feet.
Rawson says the characters all come together and Caddy ultimately faces a difficult decision between stark reality and an appealing fantasy life.
“Most of the things I write are a little bit surreal, often people have a fairly loose grip on reality and a lot of their life is imaginary, which is a pretty strong theme in this novel.”
The Gap was partly inspired by Rawson’s time in the Victorian public service, while the dystopian vision of a city suffering under the climate change onslaught is a filtering of her current role as environment editor of academic journalism website The Conversation.
Much of the novel is set in and Footscray and Yarraville, offering familiar glimpses to keen-eyed readers.
Rawson said it was great spending several months wandering around thinking about what the area would look like in decay.
Rawson grew up in Canberra and her work for Lonely Planet has taken her to San Francisco and Cambodia, but after eight years living here she is happily embedded in the western suburbs.
A Wrong Turn at The Office of Unmade Lists will be launched at the Sun Bookshop, Yarraville, at 7pm next Thursday.
