Hydra opens with a female character up a tree, pursued by snarling dogs and what seem to be military personnel. The fright is palpable, the threat of capture and violence imminent. Nightmare? Flashback? Premonition? No matter: the reader is then jauntily pushed into the first-person narration of Anja, 31 years old (maybe) and inclined to feline brooches (Léa Stein), “miserabilism” (per her “dear friend Beth”) and clever, spiteful observations about her colleagues at Geoffrey Browne Auction House. These are Lawrence, the director, whose “polished vowels, kooky socks, expensive suits and orderly procession of pretty fuckboys” cover a wooden interior; and the fawning, smirking Fran (a “fraudulent aesthete haunting me”), Anja’s colleague, determined to beat her to the coveted rank of specialist.
The cut between that brief scene of terror and this plush world is unsettling – a narrative tripwire pulled tight, which the reader spends the rest of Adriane Howell’s sinister, elegant debut preparing to stumble over.
With a nonchalant drip-feed of information, Howell lays out several mysteries. Anja is just back from Greece, where something bad has happened; she is no longer wearing her wedding ring. There’s a series of typewritten transcripts from the late 80s – intelligence reports from a military investigation into gruesome discoveries on a Victorian base. By 40 pages in, the pressure is building. Howell’s prose (or Anja’s voice, same-same) is deceptively calm.
But the biggest source of tension is Anja herself – vulnerable and calculating, in the mould of a character in Julia Leigh or Ottessa Moshfegh. She is initially a sympathetic enough misfit: inspired but academically thwarted, preoccupied with her dead mother and absent father, fixated on remaking the antiques world with her own “superior taxonomic method” (“a classification of objects based on emotional response” that emerges charmingly at unexpected moments in the plot). Her actions get progressively more bizarre, and her life starts to unravel. After one especially startling incident, she is let go from the auction house and finds herself in a dilapidated property on the Mornington Peninsula – the base that featured in the military reports.
From here, Hydra becomes superbly creepy, and Anja’s narration feels suddenly less reliable. She might be getting closer to the heart of the military mystery; she might be being followed; she might just be losing it. You’re not sure, you realise, which would be worse. Punctured with moments of injury and physical shock, the whole book teeters on the edge of control.
Howell’s upper-class Australian setting, with its “lamps to rewire, Georg Jensen to polish and Charles Blackmans to authenticate”, has an unsafe edge from the start. It’s similar to Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home or some of the Roald Dahl stories in its icy, comic dialogue. These characters are shamelessly privileged, Anja included. Her choices of simile (“hidden like a silkworm”; “faces like cuckoo clocks”) convey something unpleasant even in their luxury. Under the mannered surfaces, something visceral broils. Like the Queen Anne pieces Anja doesn’t particularly like – “a design period so feminine one could imagine menstrual blood seeping from the furniture’s joints”.
The gothic streak in this book is unmistakable: the pickled grandeur of the auction house; the obsession with boundaries; the constant sense of psychosexual threat; the dismembered animals (echoes of Chloe Hooper’s debut). But, as the poet Evelyn Araluen has noted about gothic fiction set in the bush – and about so much gothic fiction in Australia generally – to make the environment the site of menace is to flatten its ongoing significance, flatten it into a prop in a drama of (usually) white anxiety. Anja finds the isolation and threat novel, and even titillating. The elephant in the room is the real and much more terrifying history of these places, not so very far back. Hanging over the novel is that notorious Australian legend, the big cat (our “collective slip of the imagination”, a detective warns Anja). The real violence of extinction taking place in front of these characters is largely ignored, in favour of a more alluring, imported myth.
Incidentally, novels need to stop playing the Donald Trump card (this era’s “and it was all a dream”) – particularly those that aren’t focused on the US. What does it signify, metaphorically, politically, to drop the 2016 election in? Not as much as so many authors seem to think. In Hydra, even a brief mention of Trump feels like a clumsy departure from the kinked satire of the rest of the book, a distraction from its delicate atmosphere of jangle and paranoia – though not enough to spoil anything too much. Howell’s frenzied finale is hugely enjoyable, and, slyly, somehow refuses to resolve the question of who, exactly, has gone beyond the pale – Anja, or everyone else.
Hydra by Adriane Howell is out now in Australia (Transit Lounge, $29.99)
