A group of friends decide to buy a block of paradise in the country: this could be the setup for a thousand stories but, in Kate Mildenhall’s fourth novel, The Hiding Place, it is a vision soon muddied by lies, betrayal and death.
Lou, the instigator of the plan to buy the abandoned mining town in the middle of the bush, is queer, white and progressive. She sees herself and her friends as good people – the kind of people who work hard, vote left and try to take care of the land and each other. So when she sees the Willow Creek property come up for sale, she sees the chance to buy a dream – and “a place for connection and rejuvenation”.
Four families buy in: Lou and her wife, Marnie; two of their oldest friends, Flick and Josie, with their respective partners; Lou’s recently divorced sister, Ness, and their mum, Avril. But there are tensions at play in the group – one of them is using the land to grow psychoactive plants and two are having an affair. There are stresses about money and work. The vision that Lou believes unites them is further undermined by individual insecurities and petty resentment. It’s an ensemble primed for conflict.
On their first weekend at the property, Lou’s plan is to relax and get the loo fixed. Flick’s husband, Phil, a man whose masculinity seems to be constantly under threat from the outspoken women in the group, is determined to prove himself by serving up a whole lamb for Sunday lunch. The kids are going to put on a talent show. But their arrival is tainted by a series of unwelcome events: a deer causes Ness to run her trailer off the road, unwelcome squatters are camped by the edge of the river, and a boundary dispute with a neighbour turns ugly.
Mildenhall packs a lot into the novel and, for the most, part manages the competing tensions between the characters well, although the ambitious scope does lead to slightly superficial resolutions in some instances. The deer, for example, which is the first image of wrongness in the novel, is introduced as an enormous shape that “looms still and gigantic”, and later expanded on – “something not right about the head, the shape of it”. But the disturbing image loses some of its potency amid the busyness of the novel. Mildenhall alternates between the perspectives of Lou, Phil, Ness, Flick, Josie, and Lou’s 16-year-old daughter, Stella, meaning that all four families are represented, and the reader is privy to the various secrets being kept before they ignite.
Of these narrators, Stella is the most interesting. On the cusp of adulthood, with all the fury of girlhood and limited agency still coursing through her, Stella’s is the voice that exposes the hypocrisy and performance at the heart of the adults’ behaviour. When the adults are debating the squatters, full of righteous indignation that a family is making themselves so at home on “their” land, Stella thinks to herself: “That family would have more of a connection to this place than they all do, and they’re not doing any harm.” She “bets that if they were First Nations or refugees or someone else ‘deserving’ the adults would be falling over themselves for them to stay”.
Sardonic but still gently hopeful, Stella is still trying to work out who she is. She’s too old to be one of the kids but too young to be considered an adult, and is just beginning to “really see” the world. Her perspective shifts the way we see the other characters, exposing their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. In this light, the adults aren’t a particularly likable cast, and so Stella is a more sympathetic perspective to attach to.
Mildenhall is a clever writer, clearly attuned to the various conventions and expectations of genre. While her novels, since her 2017 debut, Skylarking, have taken an increasingly commercial path, The Hiding Place hits all the beats of a satisfying thriller – she puts her own twist on certain elements. In part it’s the undercurrent of social satire and the overt irony of white settlers imposing themselves as custodians of stolen land, pinning up an acknowledgment of country sign moments after putting up fences and discussing how best to remove the squatters.
But it’s also the ordering of events – less than halfway through the novel, one of the characters is dead and there’s no doubt who’s responsible. Mildenhall keeps the reader invested by pushing each of the characters to their limits. With all the secrets between them, are these really the kind of friends who would help each other hide a body?
Mildenhall is an accomplished storyteller and The Hiding Place is an edge-of-your-seat thriller with an ending that, when it comes, will knock you out of it completely.
The Hiding Place by Kate Mildenhall is published by Simon & Schuster ($34.99)
