When she’s not gazing up into the night sky, the teen narrator of Inga Simpson’s terrific new dystopian novel, The Thinning, spends a great deal of time looking anxiously at the bright orange watch her mother has strapped to her wrist. Fin Kelvin is her name, and like the reader, she doesn’t know whether she’s living at the end of the world or on the cusp of something new.
Fin and her family have had to adapt to the demands of a rapidly changing world, one shaped by relentless resource extraction. They are reeling with grief as they try to survive on a planet on the brink of systems collapse. The Barrier Reef is dead, the last koala is gone, the Great Artesian Basin is contaminated, human fertility rates are plummeting and “the moon’s cycles are all out of whack” thanks to a space mining incident.
The skies, meanwhile, are losing their darkness, thanks to the thousands of satellites that were launched to meet demand for communications technology – and to allow authoritarian governments and the sinister corporation MuX to surveil the citizenry.
For Fin, who grew up at the Siding Spring Observatory (on Gamilaraay country in regional New South Wales), the child of a distinguished astronomer and an astrophotographer, the loss of darkness is particularly painful. She learns about cultural astronomy, especially from Indigenous ranger Uncle Nate, and comes to understand light pollution as not just an impediment to scientific observation, but a new form of colonialism.
Nothing in Fin’s world is safe or stable any more. She gets pulled out of school when her principal lets it slip that compulsory fertility tests for women of childbearing age are on the way. She and her mum, Dianella, go off-grid after her father dies, living in the national park near the observatory. Dianella is a beguiling, heartbroken figure who simultaneously tries to shield her daughter from the brutal realities of a world on the tipping point and to prepare her for every catastrophic contingency by teaching her survival skills. “We had plans, as a family and as individuals, for every eventuality – except for what actually happened,” Fin reflects ruefully.
Fin’s watch is synchronised to another worn by Dianella, who has given Fin a mission. She must travel from the Warrumbungle mountain range across the Pilliga region to the radio tower at Mount Kaputar in time for the solar eclipse. Once there, she must send a laser signal back to her mother. Fin doesn’t understand her mission, and she’s not particularly happy about it because she’s got to look after another teenager: Terry, a teary fugitive with no bush skills.
Fin is not so much an unreliable narrator as one frantic to make sense of the world she lives in before time runs out. We witness her efforts to metabolise the profound shocks of her era – extinctions, mass suicide and death, coerced reproduction, the fragmenting of families and communities. All the while the watch on her wrist counts down to the eclipse, like a ticking bomb.
The snappy tension of the present tense is frequently broken by Fin’s flashes back to her childhood and her acute observations of the natural world. It is a pleasure to see the Warrumbungles and the native forests of the Pilliga through her anxious eyes – on watching little birds at play, she notes: “I worry that if I stop paying attention, they’ll go” – and to try to think with her about another timeframe beyond the urgent and terrifying present.
For Fin, looking up helps. As her father told her: “When we look at the stars, we’re actually looking into the past. And the farther away we’re looking, the further back in time we’re seeing.” By inviting her readers to think about cosmic time, Simpson reminds us that the ticking clock is not the only way to understand time.
Even so, from the moment Fin and Terry set off on their journey, The Thinning moves with the compressed momentum of a thriller towards a spectacular climax at the eclipse. This is a moment where everyone on Earth, it seems, is looking up to the skies – and they are, in Fin’s words, “witnesses to the end of the world as we knew it”.
The eclipse chapters are stunningly wrought, and bring together both the plot and Simpson’s carefully tended metaphors about light, darkness and vision. All light is extinguished during the eclipse and “the boundaries and limits of the world are breached and broken”. When the light returns, The Thinning illuminates a way to make a new world, through the radical and transformative possibilities of collective action.
The Thinning is often melancholy, registering the profound losses of the climate crisis through the experience of a traumatised, exhausted teenager in the wild, searing darkness of the eclipse. But there is hope here too; Fin asks, “What if we could see a way to make a new world, where all beings, no matter how fragile, could thrive?”
The Thinning by Inga Simpson is out now (Hachette Australia, $32.99)
