Madeleine Watts’s first novel, 2020’s The Inland Sea, was an urban fever dream, an ambitious, sophisticated and slightly uneven creation. In it, intimations of climate breakdown, reflections on gendered violence and a rejection of the great Australian ugliness were grafted on to a narrative about a young woman adrift in the interregnum between the end of her university studies and a planned move abroad. Woven through it was a series of excerpts from the journals of the explorer John Oxley, detailing his search for Australia’s mythical inland sea.
Water – imagined and real – also plays a big part in Watts’s enormously impressive second novel, Elegy, Southwest. Set in 2018, as the Camp Fire swept through northern California – destroying communities in Paradise, Concow and elsewhere, and blanketing much of the state in thick smoke – it follows young narrator Eloise and her partner, Lewis, as they take a road trip through California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Eloise narrates these events from somewhere in the future, after an unnamed calamity has overtaken Lewis, leaving her raking over the events of those weeks for some clue to explain what happened.
