Above everything else, this is a terrific story and very well told. It’s a bit of a parable and classic Mandy Hager which means as well as a damn good story, believable characters, heroes to root for and deep thinking, you get (but it wouldn’t work without all the rest), the Hager ethic, written from the heart with the belief that stories can change lives. Lifted really is next level.
I was totally immersed from the start, where our young narrator Elora is living three centuries in the future in a kind of self-sufficient sanctuary built into a cliff where she looks after a precious surviving library with three elderly companions. A stranger arrives at the door and calls her on a journey. Other small pockets of humanity exist, living back in the dark ages across the wilderness far away. It’s climate collapse and human greed that has left them all stranded. (Interestingly, America turned blue yesterday and the inevitable and immediate dread I felt while reading seemed to recede a bit). Adding insult to the collapse of civilisation are the Avians, an alien bird-like species who hover above the earth in their satellite home, hunting humans for sport, catching the unwary in traps so they can peck out their pineal gland and livers. These delicacies are an Avian aphrodisiac – a version of our shark fin or rhino horn. They dump their toxic waste on earth.
You see where this is going. The parallels of Avian/human civilisation run all through the book and it’s not subtle. This is Mandy Hager getting mad and boy, can she get mad cleverly and dramatically. This is what she does so very well. She is an activist. We should all get mad. We should throw this book at every developing teenage brain and don’t let them go until they’ve read it.
The journey of Elora and the stranger, Kristos, takes them on a long trek through the wilderness in an epic journey, facing perils at every turn (Lord of the Rings came to mind) as they strive to fulfill a demand of the Avians, which might, just, save the world. It seems an impossible task. The writing is deceptively simple, compelling. We start to recognise an Aotearoa New Zealand landscape, our birds beginning to return, Urew rising above the waters and holding the descendants of Māori activists, survivors of the collapse.
I did wonder about whether it would take three hundred years after the collapse of civilisation for humanity to regroup. We are survivors by nature. If Kristos was able to disable the Avian’s nets it must be a teachable skill, so they would no longer be ‘overfished’. Surely within a generation we would not be living in ruins, but, once again, have reinvented the wheel and everything that followed? Perhaps I am too much the optimist. I should be grateful that Mandy Hager let any of us survive at all.
Very political, very clever, very punchy and very, very good.
