AustLit

Much of the Great Dividing Range that runs across Eastern Australia was burning while I wrote this book. In Canberra our days were punctuated with the anxious checking of air quality and emergency services apps. Amanda Lohrey is a writer who speaks to these times: her work is concerned with the relationship between people and the communities and environments they live with. More specifically, she writes about our apprehension of crisis and its proximity. Lohrey's novels use the motif of fire to engage with ethical and political questions about how individuals feel, and take, responsibility for others, especially in relation to environmental crisis. Fire acts both as symbol and plot device in Lohrey's novels and stories; it is a real crisis that is also a metaphor for catastrophe more generally. This is especially the case in The Reading Group (1988) and Vertigo: A Pastoral (2008). Two decades separate the publication of these novels, and formally they are extremely different, yet they show the continuation of a series of ideas about the relationship between personal and political conflagrations: how private life is impacted by political events, and how it can also be understood through the lens of large-scale crisis such as fire.' (Introduction)