By Sue Turnbull
CRIME
Lyrebird
Jane Caro
Allen and Unwin, $34.99
It’s hard to imagine a more Australian premise for a crime novel than that of Lyrebird.
Deep in the Barrington Tops National Park, a hungover ornithologist is taking a pee in the bush when she hears a woman screaming. Alarmed, she creeps towards the source of the cries only to discover a superb male lyrebird on display, doing what lyrebirds do best: mimicking the sounds he has heard. While this orchestral arrangement features other bird calls, chainsaws, and a car engine ... it also includes the terrified cries of a woman being murdered.
Twenty years on, and a body has been found in the Burraga Swamp, exactly where the lyrebird danced. The young ornithologist, Jessica, is now an associate professor teaching at the local university, while the female police officer to whom she initially reported the sighting has left the force. Sadly, the latter is not enjoying retirement as much as she thought she would, following the recent death of her beloved husband. Megan is therefore quietly delighted when she is called on to investigate a cold case that was always hers from the start.
While The Mother, Caro’s first foray into crime fiction, was a confronting take on the problem of coercive control and domestic violence, the politically savvy Walkley Award winner is highlighting a different set of contemporary issues here within the familiar (and more reassuring) genre of the police procedural.
Jane Caro’s second novel is as Australian as it gets.Credit: James Brickwood
Stomping through the bush in her gumboots to view the recently discovered body, Megan invokes the determined stride of another elderly fictional female sleuth, Anne Cleeves’ Vera. This is hardly coincidental, since there’s a nice moment near the end when Megan is watching Vera on TV with her adult son who has come to look after her. And there the resemblance fades; Vera was never married and has no friends.
As in The Mother, the attention is firmly on the women. This includes not only fraught relationships between mothers and daughters, but also the enduring power of female friendship. Jessica is now a single parent managing a 15-year-old climate activist who is challenging her mother’s authority at every turn. At one point, Jessica wonders, as have many parents of teenage daughters before her, just how “her sweet and biddable child had been replaced by a foul-mouthed selfish harridan”.
Megan, on the other hand, is delighted to be reacquainted with Jessica since the lyrebird case was her first as a “still wet-behind-the-ears detective constable”, and has always regretted the fact that it was “the mockery” she copped from her male colleagues that persuaded her to give up on it: that, and the absence of a body or any other evidence of a crime. The remains discovered in the swamp, however unfortunate, are therefore a vindication of Megan and Jessica’s original conviction that a woman had indeed come to grief.
The resurrected investigation now depends on a shoelace found with the body in the swamp. This is the clue that will take Megan into Sydney’s well-heeled suburbs where the women are dressed in “linen and layers – all oatmeal and clotted cream”, as well as the brothels of Pitt Street. Along the way, we will encounter a cast of well-drawn characters including Bridie, who made the shoelace for her Filipina nurse, and Coco, the beautiful trans brothel owner.
There’s also a cracking conclusion. It’s evident from the get-go that the bush is tinder dry, and as Megan and the team close in on the chief suspects, so does the approaching firestorm. Although the locals speculate that this could have started with a dropped cigarette, there’s no doubt that Caro also intends us to think seriously about climate change.
Lyrebird is a well-crafted crime novel that does not miss a beat. It’s also as Aussie as all get-out.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.