FICTION
Radiant Heat
Sarah-Jane Collins
Berkeley, $34.99

For anyone who has experienced a bush fire, and there are increasingly more of us, Radiant Heat may bring it all back. It did for me. On Black Saturday 2009 in an outer-lying suburb of Melbourne we were 10 minutes from the fire front when it turned, and we were spared. My haunting memory is of scores of panting parrots on the deck trying to get out of the savagely hot wind as a black cloud of smoke from the north turned day to night.

I therefore immediately recognised the survivor’s guilt experienced by aspiring artist Alison, the central character in this narrative who emerges from under a wet blanket in her bathroom to discover the confounding devastation that has ensued. While one side of the driveway is nothing but “ash and black-brittle splinters”, the other is “the same mottled green-brown of hot high summer, as though nothing had happened”. But something has: there is a dead woman in a car with Alison’s name and address in her purse.

Sarah-Jane Collins was a journalist covering the aftermath of those terrible fires, an experience that she has shaped into the kind of crime novel described as “literary”. This suggests something about the perceived quality of the writing. Like a lot of crime fiction, Radiant Heat is exceptionally well written, and it also signals a narrative that refuses to play by the usual more linear genre rules.

As Alison sets out to discover why the women had her address and what they have in common apart from a spooky resemblance, we are repeatedly jolted into her past. This encompasses a montage of sequences including an idyllic childhood with her parents and family friends, her school years, her artistic career and her time in Darwin when she fell in love with a charismatic chef called Gil who hurt her, physically.

Radiant Heat is thus less a conventional crime story and more a reflection on the compounding effects of grief and trauma. Even before the bushfire brings it all to a head, Alison is grieving for her parents killed in a car crash while also recovering from an abusive relationship in which she feels complicit. As a journalist Collins also reported on crime against women in the Victorian County Court, and the ways in which Alison has managed to avoid the truth about her time with Gil rings true.

Which may be why Alison doesn’t share the information she has about the dead woman with the police. Another reason being that if she had, this would have been a very short book. But Alison is clearly not thinking straight and suffering from a complicated case of PTSD, which made me feel guilty every time I was frustrated by her poor decisions. It’s hard not to judge given the underlying goal may be that of empathy.

Along with the abiding sense of grief, dislocation and a ruined landscape, what Collins convincingly conveys is the sense of community that underpins a small town such as the fictional Lake Bend. Escaping from her parents’ house, Alison goes to Sal’s, a widowed older friend of the family for whom the making of tea is a comforting ritual to be followed in every situation. And then there’s her old school friend Billy the policeman, who loves her too much and whom she constantly and somewhat cruelly rejects.