When Susie Greenhill won the 2016 Richell prize for emerging writers, her writing was described by one of the judges, Michaela McGuire, as “electric, and profoundly affecting”. Her resulting novel’s release into the landscape of 2025 only makes it more so.
This stunning, devastating debut starts slowly, easing us into the future where the novel takes place, a future marked by global heating and mass extinction. Tom, a scientist working to find and preserve the fading vestiges of plant and wildlife, brings home specimens and treasures to share with his daughter, Orla, and his wife, Elena, at their home in the foothills of lutruwita/Tasmania. Feathers, skeletons and fins, “eggshells of the palest blue, a tiger snake’s translucent, papery skin”. But this poetic whimsy belies loss, as Tom is forced to reckon daily with the disappearance of the plants and animals he loves.
These global losses, as well as closer, more intimate ones revealed as the novel progresses, weigh heavily on Tom and, early on, Elena wakes up to find that he has left. His absence is abrupt and unexplained. So when Kit, an old friend who loved both Elena and Tom deeply, asks Elena and Orla to venture into the forest with him to see if they can find answers on an old yacht in the middle of a nearly-frozen lake, she agrees.
By this stage of the story, the effects of global heating have become more palpable – Elena and Orla’s home has been crushed by a falling tree during a storm that has devastated the city and triggered civil unrest. Elena is driven by a desperate need for answers, and the knowledge that the home she is leaving behind has been irrevocably damaged.
The reality that Greenhill describes is painfully close. Those animals that haven’t been wiped out are being pushed further out of their natural environments, with scientists working hard to manufacture something close to a natural balance. Despite glimmers of hope – lilies that bloom at the edges of flood waters, penguins returning to nest in human-made protective huts – they are largely fighting a losing battle. The animals are dying, leaving only the barest traces of themselves behind. Humans, as always, persevere, but they too have been pushed to the edges. Climate refugees flee flood, famine and fire. It’s the end of the line, a devastating global reality powerfully imagined.
What does it mean to hope in the face of this crisis? Early on, Elena believes, as so many do, that hope can be found in children and in the creation of life. But after Orla – “hope embodied” – is born, the possibility of a second child makes Tom question the ethics of raising children in a world for which he has no hope. When Carol, a work-mandated psychologist, asks Tom what he sees when he imagines his children’s future, he replies, “With everything I know about the way the Earth is changing, I can’t picture my children’s future at all.”
Greenhill writes Tom with immense empathy, presenting a man completely incapable of seeing his way out from beneath his own grief. And yet she doesn’t use it to excuse his actions, allowing Elena to express her fury at his disappearance and the selfishness of leaving her behind to raise and care for a child who is hurt and confused by his absence.
Loneliness ebbs through the characters. Despite their love for each other, they are unable to fully reach beyond one another’s grief. And while this is particularly true of Tom, whose grief is all-consuming, it is true too of Elena, in her inability to explain things to Orla; and of Kit, whose feelings for Tom have long been an unspoken truth.
In a world where so much has been lost, there is a sense, as Elena intimates when she first encourages Tom to try for a family, that finding ways to connect to each other is the most important thing there is. There’s an uneasy question lying beneath this – is connection enough? Maybe not, but love is a powerful and joy-filled filament that radiates through an otherwise bleak narrative.
Each chapter opens with an ending, or rather, an “endling”: a word that describes the moment in which the last of a species dies, alone. These endlings, while somewhat disconnected from the main narrative at first, are a powerful way of bearing witness to great global loss. A way, perhaps, to say goodbye.
Greenhill writes: ‘“Endlings’ is a word of haunting, lonely beauty, but perhaps it is impossible for any language, modern or ancient, to convey the solitude, the finality of that singular condition of being. A songbird calls out through the twilight for a mate, when there is no other like him surviving anywhere on Earth. He is alone.” She may well be summarising her own novel, evoking this deep, devastating loneliness.
This beautiful novel cuts deep – and leaves an open wound.
The Clinking by Susie Greenhill is out through Hachette Australia ($32.99)
