These two feminist novels subvert the form – and are hard to put down

Recently, perhaps as publishers have twigged to the fact that readers will pay good money for quality stories with strong female protagonists and interesting ideas therein, there’s been a rush on books marketed on their feminist bona fides.

With that comes a crop of new authors, including two debut novels both deploying prodigious, subversive takes on trope and genre while exploring the existential horrors of misogyny and violence against women.

Clare Moleta’s writing stands comparison with the master of apocalyptic fiction, Cormac McCarthy.Credit: Ebony Lamb

Clare Moleta’s post-apocalyptic road novel, Unsheltered, opens with the end of the world. In a spare, unsentimental prologue, a cataclysmic storm destroys Li’s existence in a few matter of fact paragraphs, setting the pace and tone for the novel. We join her again later on as she wakes, badly injured after an accident, and finds her eight-year-old daughter missing.

Li is tough, violent, resourceful, adept at patching the failing technology that survivors use to eke out a living. She is hard to kill, but has nothing to live for beyond finding her daughter, whom she believes is headed from the unsheltered west to the east, where it is rumoured life is safer. A mild spoiler; it is not.

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The setting, according to an author’s note, is “Australian, but not Australia”. Climate change has rendered much of the country uninhabitable. Post-colonial Australia has fallen and been replaced by patchwork governance and corporate militias.

Displaced people gather in temporary camps and sell their belongings, skills and bodies for the bare necessities of survival. The roads between settlements are infested with marauders, bandits and rapists.

In the tradition of the best dystopian fiction, Li’s world is one just like ours, with everything turned up just a little bit — modern Australia catching its reflection at an unflattering angle and finding it has aged ungracefully.

The Australian penchant for ironic euphemism to brand unthinkable things as palatable is everywhere. Storms that flatten cities and strip flesh from bone are bundled under the rubrik “Weather”. The hordes of people dispossessed by Weather are not refugees or citizens, but “unsheltered”. The corporate, profit-driven concentration camps where the unsheltered are used as slaves are “Transit”.

As she wanders the wasteland, Li is constantly on the hunt for phones, which she can use to call a hotline and try to track down her daughter through a dystopian bureaucracy. This is a novel wise enough to know that even after the end of the world, people will still be driven to despair while on hold to Centrelink.

The book is a droll, bleak commentary on refugee policy in Australia, and the bleak future that looms if we continue to do nothing to mitigate climate change and social inequity. It’s also an absolute banger of a novel.

Comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic masterpiece, The Road, are inevitable, and justified. There are echoes of McCarthy in setting, execution and style — right down to unattributed, unmarked dialogue that makes for a disorienting, and sometimes difficult reading experience.

Many authors have emulated McCarthy’s spare, windswept prose style, but few have come this close. At her best, Moleta’s writing is as beautiful and brutal as the elder statesman of nihilism, but it is also loaded with the emotional depth of a mother who will sacrifice anything, or anyone, to save her daughter. Gripping, propulsive, exhilarating, sickening — it’s a rare talent who can put both action and pathos on the page this well.

Jacqueline Bublitz is another. Her debut, Before You Knew My Name, is set in the modern era, on another continent, and with a diametrically opposed worldview. It, too, is about violence and patriarchal hegemony, but it’s as hopeful and uplifting a book about murder as you’re likely to read.

Jacqueline Bublitz subverts the tropes and cliches of crime fiction in exhilarating ways.Credit:

Two women, both recent arrivals in New York City fleeing from relationships with predatory men, cross paths, and their fates become inextricably entwined. In another world, they might have met on a park bench, chatted, become friends, but that will not happen here, because one of them is already dead.

Eighteen-year-old Alice Lee steps off a cross-country bus on Seventh Avenue with nothing in the world except a little cash and a Leica camera stolen from her small-town art teacher who groomed, statutorily raped, and discarded her. She aspires to become a photographer, and is taken in by a kindly older man who offers to look after her. A month later, she is dead, an unidentified Jane Doe, found raped and murdered in the river by the park.

Thirty-six-year-old Ruby Jones travels from Australia to New York to recover from a long-term love affair with a soon to be married man hoping to reset, and is turned upside down when she finds Alice’s body while out jogging.

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The scene – the pretty young woman found murdered in the park – is the inciting incident from countless novels, the cold open to a hundred TV episodes. Here it occurs just a little under halfway through, and is the catalyst for a different kind of story, in which Bublitz takes apart every trope and cliche of crime fiction and subverts them in strange, exhilarating ways.

Ruby becomes obsessed with identifying Jane Doe/Alice, and solving her murder. Who was Alice? Why did she die? What might she have done with her precious life?

The book undercuts the victim narrative and gives voice to the dead girl — literally, after her death, Alice goes on narrating the world around her. Alice’s voice, disembodied as she lies unidentified in the morgue, flits around the city, ruminates on the morticians and police who process her body, wonders what they think of her, frets about Ruby as she moves closer to solving the mystery.

The story is not so much a “who done it” as a “how does this happen”? What is wrong with the world that these crimes occur, and why are we obsessed with writing narratives on to them? Both Alice and Ruby are women living in a world where patriarchy, and systematic sexism make survival uncertain. On nearly every page there’s a perfectly turned phrase or observation. It’s packed with truisms that women and non-binary readers will recognise, and male readers may, to their horror, see themselves in.

It’s a little sprawling and shaggy, but given the big swings Bublitz is taking, and the extraordinary heart, imagination and insight deployed here, it couldn’t be any other way. This is an extraordinary, smart, bittersweet novel, compelling, infinitely readable.

Unsheltered, Clare Moleta, Scribner, $29.99. Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz, Allen & Unwin, $29.99.

Liam Pieper’s most recent novel, Sweetness and Light, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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