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67
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
54/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Chloe Hooper
Publisher:
Seven Stories Press
Date:
September 29, 2020
On the scorching February day in 2009, a man lit two fires in the Australian state of Victoria, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. What came to be known as the Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people and injured hundreds more, making them among the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in Australian history. As communities reeling from unspeakable loss demanded answers, detectives scrambled to piece together what really happened. They soon began to suspect the fires had been deliberately set by an arsonist. The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the puzzle of his mind.
What The Reviewers Say
To describe a bushfire is to describe a monster. We speak of flanks, fingers, tails and tongues, Chloe Hooper observes in The Arsonist, of a predatory, devouring hunger.
In The Arsonist, Hooper reignites the memories of those cataclysmic events with relentless, devastating effect. Her focus is on one fire, deliberately lit, an 82,000-acre flare-up on the outskirts of Churchill in Central Gippsland.
Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. But the central character of The Arsonist is Brendan Sokaluk, a shadowy shapeshifter, and the book an inquiry into why he set his hometown ablaze.
What drives people to light bushfires? Spite? Revenge? Psychosis? A fierce need by the luckless and downtrodden to control events for once? Maybe an urge to initiate something elemental and – in this country – even mythical? We might never know the mind of a firebug. But as Australia faces increasingly warm summers in a changing climate, Chloe Hooper attempted to find out.
