In Footscray, 1933, Lil Martin watches as women around her endure poverty, violence and loss, and wonders if anything will ever change. When she invites her neighbour’s daughter, Peggy, into her house as a boarder, Lil is unknowingly beginning a friendship that will have a ripple effect far into the future. Years later, in 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hilda struggles to retain control of her memories and her dignity in the agonising isolation of assisted living. In 2031, La reluctantly takes a job at an Amazon-esque warehouse, lured by the promise of a regular income and an attractive health and wellbeing package. Later still, in the unknown future of 2181, sisters Onyx and Maz search for precious treasures in the remnants of our shattered civilisation.
If this sounds like a lot, it is. These are just three of the six narrative strands that Kate Mildenhall expertly weaves together in her third novel, The Hummingbird Effect. It feels lazy to call this sort of work ambitious, but there is incredible ambition in the way that Mildenhall exerts herself as a writer with each new book. She’s a writer who seems reluctant to settle, moving from historical fiction in her debut Skylarking, to the more commercial feminist thriller The Mother Fault, and now this genre-defying novel that spans more than two centuries and still manages to be easily enjoyable. The concerns of all three novels point to a deeply focused mind concerned with one question: what will it take to save us from ourselves?
The Hummingbird Effect cycles through four main locations: Footscray in 1933; Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care in 2020; Footscray in 2031 and various coastal locations in 2181. These are punctuated by excerpts from a philosophical conversation between a human interviewer and an AI program named the Hummingbird Project, which the interviewer hopes will solve the problems of humanity.
All of these narratives are held together by the wider context of deep time, which Mildenhall writes as sections of freeform poetry that speak to a world that will survive beyond humanity. The jumps in time are connected more by theme than character, and this gives Mildenhall the freedom to experiment with genre and plot rather than binding her to a precise set of genealogies. Rather than tracing a genetic bloodline, the lines that Mildenhall traces are political and ethical heartlines – all of which begin with Lil Martin in 1933.
At the beginning of the book, Lil reflects on the way that women, when broken, are more “considerate” than men: “A woman tried to make herself invisible, fainter and fainter until you just forgot she was there.” In many ways this is a tenet that Lil herself lives by: she’s certainly not a provocative character, and definitely not in comparison to many of the other women in the book. Lil wants a respectable, hard-working boarder who might also offer some friendship.
She finds all of these qualities in Peggy, until Peggy falls in love with Jack, a slaughterman who describes the process of killing a lamb in a way that verges on sexual thrill: “He is ready for her. He embraces the skittish animal, feels the pulse of her, warm beneath the shorn wool. Holds her firm, legs caught between his knees, forelegs held steady over his left arm, and cuts her neck clean and true. She hasn’t made a sound.” Jack courts Peggy with a similar sexual aggression, and when she becomes pregnant just as his job at the meatworks seems under threat, Jack’s capacity for violence erupts.
These scenes are the foundation for themes that Mildenhall carries throughout the book, speaking to the ways that women love, the ways they care for each other and the inadequacy of violence as a means of control. Interestingly, the role of trade unions and collective action is also a key theme, a topic that feels underexplored in fiction as a critical component of our collective survival.
In each subsequent part of the narrative, Mildenhall zeroes in on the devastating effects of the outsourcing of care. In 1933 it’s just a new machine in the slaughterhouse, introduced for efficiency and threatening the jobs of the workers. In 2020 Hilda is living the final weeks of her life alone, with barely any nursing staff or family around thanks to the pandemic and bureaucratic red tape.
In the believably challenging economic times of 2031 – less than a decade ahead from us - La and her girlfriend Cat struggle to balance their moral commitment to activism with the economic pressures of capitalism. Only Onyx and Maz, in the more speculative future of 2181, sit somewhat outside these concerns, the remnants of technology they discover along the coast telling an abstract cautionary tale.
Mildenhall’s vision of humanity’s future feels gentler than some of the more bruising speculations across pop culture, although she’s no less critical. In The Hummingbird Project, we’re not presented with an image of humanity as the sole survivors on a burned out planet, but an ecosystem that positions people as a vital part of a larger whole. It is a work that compels its reader to consider gentleness, poetry and a deeper care for others as vital, urgent skills required for our collective survival.
The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall is published by Simon & Schuster in Australia ($32.99)
