Anchor Point

"This book was published three years ago, and it’s interesting that it was set in both the past and the near future. The story is told in the third person and is divided into four sections, starting in 1984 then segueing to 1997, 2008 and what was then seen as the “near future” of 2018. Which is where we are today. It’s not a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, far from it, and it tries to give readers a sense of hope rather than grind them down with doom and gloom. It’s a family drama, about white people in Australia living close to the land and sometimes visiting the big cities. It’s also about the indigenous people of that island continent, and Robinson is not afraid to look into the nation’s Aboriginal origins. And while Australia is far away from North America and Europe, the land is also beset by massive wildfires, floods and droughts, just like in California, France and Spain. Anchor Point means a safe harbour, and I feel that Robinson meant for her novel itself to be a safe harbour in the midst of gathering global storms that are linked now to climate change. The book seemingly appeared in Australia out of nowhere at the time, with the novel making small, hopeful literary waves in the country, but getting little recognition overseas in North America or Europe. It’s too bad because it’s a very good cli-fi novel and deserved a wider readership. I asked Alice by email about the book back in 2015. I wanted to know if she wrote the novel out of fear for an uncontrollable near future or as a book about grief. She told me: I am living in a culture here in Australia that has been incredibly slow, negligently slow, to come to terms with the reality of climate change. I feel that talking openly about the prospect of a perilous future in this nation is received as alarmist, unhinged, hysterical. In the long term, I feel profound grief over the loss of beautiful, magical places, plants and creatures in the world. It is a horrible consequence of taking climate change seriously that my encounters with nature now already feel somewhat nostalgic, even painful, as though the beauty of the world is fleeting, already lost to me. The book spans 35 years and it ends with the final chapter in 2018, when some massive bushfires begin to impact on big city dwellers as well as rural people. It’s written in a quiet, controlled way, and in many ways it does not read like a climate fiction novel at all. There are no lectures, there is no preaching, there are no long information dumps. Anchor Point is literary fiction, with the people and the land of the author’s native country forming the backdrop to her controlled storytelling. I loved reading this book."