Superb lyrebirds (Menura novaehollandiae) are nature’s archivists. From chirrups to chainsaws, they gather the sounds of the forest and preserve them in living playback. We mistake it for avian showmanship but it is also testimony: their songs record the damage we do, the creatures we erase. Lyrebirds hold us to account.
Johanna Bell’s debut, Department of the Vanishing, is a lyrebird of a book. It sounds like plenty of other things: you can hear snatches of Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers; Australian eco-novelists like James Bradley, Charlotte McConaghy and Jennifer Mills; and the poetry of John Kinsella and Judith Wright. But Bell is no imitator, she’s making her own noise. She opens with a magnificent chorus: a double-page spread of transliterated birdsong. It reads like a manifesto – a statement of what’s at stake.
In Bell’s imagined future, the air has fallen quiet. Birds are dying in their millions: “Wings falling / from cloudless skies / majestic bodies splayed”. Magpies, rosellas, honeyeaters, pelicans: all of them gone. Overheated, infected, eggless. Livers full of pesticides, bellies full of plastic.
It’s an administrative headache, keeping track of the obliteration. Welcome to the Department of the Vanishing (DoV): a government office tasked with cataloguing the casualties of the Anthropocene – well, most of them. There aren’t enough resources to record every lost creature, so priorities are set by senior management. The archive keeps things safe: safe from being noticed, from being missed, from being mourned. It is where extinct species come to die a second time.
Our narrator, Ava Wilde, has spent two decades boxing the dead, and trying to believe that what she does serves some kind of public good (“my fingernails click at speed / sweeping the threatened mess we’ve made / under the hum of fluoro lights”). But something in her has come undone in the DoV’s officious tomb. We first meet Ava in a police interrogation room in the summer of 2029, accused of stealing files. What has she tried to set loose, and why? Is it possible to steal something that no longer exists? Who owns a memory once it has been filed away? And why do these questions lead back to Ava’s father, a naturalist who vanished 30 years ago while chasing the song of a lyrebird? Ava’s mother may hold crucial information but dementia is steadily hollowing her memory – neural termites at work.
And so the New South Wales police gather (and redact) their evidence, Ava remembers, her mother forgets, and we are left to assemble a story from whatever clues survive the bureaucracy – detectives as much as readers. Will we dare to admit we’re part of the crime scene?
Written largely in verse, Bell’s novel is not built for tidy elevator pitches or marketing departments; it’s the kind of wild little miracle that only exists because of the risk-taking of independent presses (three cheers for Transit Lounge). There are historical photographs and mocked-up artefacts, witness statements and field notes, natural history factoids and feather fronds. If you were feeling fancy, you could call the form a paratextual bricolage. You could also call it a murder-board. Or a bird’s nest. Or the future.
There are quibbles to be made: Ava Wilde’s name is far too perfect, and her erotic misadventures drift into weary (and conservative) sad-girl territory; her missing father is more interesting than her emotionally absent lover (or, to put it another way, her daddy is more interesting than her daddy issues); and the verse can be a little flat. Still, it’s rare – and genuinely thrilling – to encounter a book this formally alive. The first time I flicked through it, I made the kind of noise you might make if a real lyrebird strutted into the room.
There’s also something deeply gratifying about being trusted to help build meaning rather than simply receive it. Ozlit has produced some wonderful participatory novels lately (see Rodney Hall’s Vortex). A kindred read is Host Cities by David Owen Kelly, another indie press gem. It’s a novel of the Aids crisis that begins as memoir and ends as dystopia. The sly terror and brilliance of Kelly’s book is never quite knowing when one slides into the other; it’s all so administratively plausible.
Bell’s DoV is equally plausible, with its squalid basement office and ever-shrinking budget. I suspect some version of the office already exists, somewhere down the corridor from the Threatened Species Commissioner. A lyrebird file well under way. It’s telling that the dozens of newspaper headlines Bell includes in her book – pages and pages of eco-terror – are all real.
From Kafka to Orwell, novelists have long known that our worst monsters keep office hours; the quiet brutality of diligence and procedure. Consider the new terms we’ve adopted over the past decade: solastalgia, eco-paralysis, shifting baseline syndrome, terraphobia, climate grief. There is power in naming things but also something unforgivable – something obscene – about making erasure seem so ordinary. Birdsong fades and the dictionary fattens. This is how the world ends, Bell’s novel warns: not with a bang but with the click of a filing cabinet.
Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell is published by Transit Lounge (RRP $34.99)
