The Trespassers

After the last election, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australians don't care about anything that's important. Not about climate change, not about refugees, not about homelessness, older women adrift without a secure income, or the stinginess of Newstart. (And maybe not even embarrassed about our recent betrayal of small neighbouring countries in the Pacific though it's too soon to say). Electors were of course having to choose between a party that openly panders to the lowest common denominator, and a graceless party torn between being electable and having some kind of ethical stance. Not much of a choice, really.

But because I tend to like my fellow-Australians, I prefer to think that what look like mean-spirited choices show more happen because they are just busy, and too preoccupied (often by sport) to pay proper attention. Tired out at the end of the day and content to invest whatever energy is left in watching The Bachelorette or women's footy or some crime drama with or without guns. I'm like that too, when MasterChef is on. I'm on bypass for the entire season because the show starts at the same time as what passes for current affairs on the ABC. That kind of switching-off is very bad for democracy. But telling voters that they ought to pay attention so that they can make informed electoral choices is never going to work. One of the things we are most complacent about is democracy.

Which is partly why I think Meg Mundell's new book is so brilliant. The Trespassers is gripping reading, unputdownable from the first chapter, and inhabited by characters impossible to forget. The near-future in which the book set, is (rather like Rohan Wilson's Daughter of Bad Times) not really the future at all. The story's timeline is only a few decades away, but the events that propel it are already happening now. This novel will lure people into paying attention and they will love reading it even as it compels them to face unpalatable truths. show less

(8.5)I began this book without reading the blurb but knew it came recommended. How disturbing to read a book published in 2019 about a pandemic stricken Britain. Who could have imagined that this would actually be the case worldwide within 12 months. So much of the language i.e. PPE gear is now part of our everyday vocabulary. The book is set in the 2060's and presents a dystopian world, the ship forging its way through a sea polluted by rubbish, carrying a group of migrants, who have been screened and vetted for habitation in Australia. Is this the way of the future. Scarily it may be so.
This book was so relevant to these times.