By Jessie Tu
FICTION
The Campers
Maryrose Cuskelly
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Reading Maryrose Cuskelly’s The Campers is like watching a new reality television show called Neighbours Gone Wild!
The show’s central figure, Leah, is our book’s protagonist, though she is the least interesting figure of the ensemble cast. Leah lives with her husband and two children in The Drove, a cosy street in a leafy inner-city suburb where the residents are shamelessly affluent and do nice things for each other, such as leaving garden produce at the front door of their neighbours’ homes.
Then there are characters such as Barb and Gail who are the voice of reason and compassion (we all know a kind old lady called Barb) and the overzealous stickybeaks, the shit stirrers, and the self-righteous Millennials. The Drovers, as they like to call themselves, are “puffed up with notions of noblesse oblige” and stringently maintain the wily art of being friendly, tolerant neighbours to people who are ostensibly strangers. It’s a tricky aptitude to display, for neighbours are forever on the precipice of slipping into our most private, intimate setting – our home, where we like to believe we can be unapologetically ourselves.
But when a group of campers set up temporary shelter at the end of the street in a well-kept public park, the neighbourhood group chat goes off. The texts from these group chats are the real highlight of the novel, for it is here where the characters turn into real life people you know.
One neighbour suggests they “try for social welfare intervention”. Another suggests calling the police. Perhaps it’s a tent city, another cries: “Tent cities popping up in numerous suburbs and regional towns!” Perhaps the campers are harmless salt-of-the-earth hippies trying to build an “intentional community”?
Maryrose Cuskelly’s novel is a portrayal of disparate characters coming up against foreign forces.
Whatever the case, the group chat quickly descends into political farce – the once-friendly neighbours are suddenly arguing about land rights, Indigenous rights, immigrants who are lumped together with trespassers, the homelessness crisis, the housing shortage. And so on and on.
Whatever the case, nobody is happy because the campers’ presence is impinging on the Drover’s quality of life. Weird things start to happen.
First, small stuff. A car is vandalised. A pet goes missing. But then it gets a bit more serious. Someone’s produce is stolen from their backyard. Then someone is injured by flying glass from a thrown bottle. Trespass, theft, grievous bodily harm. With each impending crime, the neighbours shed their niceties and unleash their true nature.
Meanwhile, Leah is secretly harbouring an uncontrollable animal attraction to the camp’s leader, Sholto, a man with dark coiled dreadlocks, olive skin, and muscled limbs – a man who “enjoyed the power his good looks and charisma gave him over others”.
“His very flesh seemed vibrant, thrumming to a non-human frequency,” Leah observes. Her attraction to him is both thrilling and mortifying to her. “Were his easy charm and glossy beauty a psychopath’s veneer?” she ponders. (Erm, DUH.) But she’s itching for him with a ferocity she does not recognise, for her own sexual desires have waned since having two children. Now, all she does with her husband is endure what she calls “maintenance sex”.
Whether Leah will risk her stable, comfortable existence for a chance to hook up with the young, sexy hunk is actually the least interesting question in The Campers. Cuskelly is more curious about drawing out the mystery surrounding the campers’ motivation for erecting their shelter at The Drove. Is one of the neighbours hiding a secret beef with its leader?
The twist in the final act of the novel is satisfying enough, though some unresolved questions linger past the final page. The television equivalent would certainly score points for encouraging its viewers to vote the neighbours off the street week by week.
Cuskelly has crafted an earnest portrayal of disparate characters coming up against foreign forces without becoming an allegory for the refugee crisis. It’s simply an entertaining, not-in-my-backyard tale, and leaves readers pondering what they would do if they were living in The Drove.
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