BOOKS

UNSHELTERED

by Clare Moleta

Scribner/Simon & Schuster — $35

The father and his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Max and the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and now Li and her daughter, Matti — the highways of the post-apocalyptic planet appear likely to be overrun by single adults and children.

Li spends most of the book searching for the lost Matti across a hostile landscape that is a version of the Australian outback, after a series of environmental catastrophes have destroyed the world we know. The novel has all the necessary apparatus to create this new fictional world, including institutions such as makecamp, XB Force and the Population Distribution Agency. Comparisons are possibly being drawn with the situation of real-life Aboriginal parents and children, as well as with other places around the world where families are forcibly separated.

It’s the most heartbreaking of scenarios, which is why the novel’s conclusion is so problematic and bound to be polarising, because in its last three pages the book betrays the premise of the previous 300.

also illustrates two current trends that should be discouraged. One is the absence of quotation marks in direct speech, so