Author of the buzzy gothic horror The Farm, Jessica Mansour-Nahra returns with a Cli-Fi novel with the bones of a thriller, but the heart of a meditation on our post-Covid world.
The year is 2030 and university social media officer Carmen is in Airlock, a form of lockdown enforced to protect Australian citizens from ferocious bushfires. Carmen lives alone in Sydney and has come to enjoy the solitude of her daily routine, but when the government announces the Airlock is lifting, her old friends urge her to join them on a road trip to the NSW South Coast town of Eden.
The band of friends set-off for the promise of idyllic beach-side cabins. In Rhett, Dan, Carmen and Eleni, Jessica offers us four archetypal responses to an enforced isolation. Carmen’s best-friend Eleni is a doctor who disappeared into her work during the crisis. Dan is a small business owner whose decade-old enterprise did not survive the government’s measures, and he is bitter about the lack of support he received. These two are the couple of the group, but their relationship has been warped by the fire and what came after.
Rhett seems to have retained the defining upbeat qualities he possessed before everyone was shut-up in their homes, but as the trip rolls on, he too reveals how the isolation changed and him, and the consequences of his conduct.
Despite the troupe’s hopes for escape and reconnection, it soon becomes clear that the threat has not passed entirely, and it will take more than a holiday to heal the scars of the last disaster. The conversations are suffused with a grim, defeatist view of the world. Carmen questions the morality of having children in a warming world. Themes of radicalization, the manosphere and extreme, alternative lifestyle choices are canvassed. Billed as a “nerve-shredding psychological thriller”, the book is more contemplative and reflective than the blazing cover suggests. The action is crammed into the back end, which is a shame, because it is genuinely nail-biting once it kicks off and Jessica has done an excellent job of turning up the heat as the blaze closes in.
The Burn shares a lot of DNA with Jessica’s debut, The Farm, in that the Australian landscape plays a huge role. The author leverages our land’s vastness and hostility to amplify the sinister actions of the antagonists. But, as with The Farm, descriptions of the environment sometimes come at the cost of forward momentum. The land is rendered beautifully, even hauntingly, but in parts excessively. At times, it slows the action. That being said, The Burn is a more confident novel than Jessica’s first. Fans of The Farm will devour it.
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