The Rain Heron

December 14, 2020
Arnott’s vibrant and violent latest (after Flames) follows two women on their hunt for a mythical creature in the aftermath of a violent military coup. After a folkloric sketch about a legendary rain heron’s ability to grant both bounty and destruction, Arnott shifts to Ren, an older woman living on a mountain whose quiet life is interrupted by the arrival of army lieutenant Zoe Harker, a veteran of the coup. Zoe has been ordered to capture the rain heron, and she tries to force Ren to reveal the bird’s location. Ren resists, leading to a fight in which Zoe loses an eye. Flashbacks flesh out Zoe’s childhood in a seaside town, where a stranger kills Zoe’s aunt for defying him, an episode that leads Zoe to realize, in the present, that she’s become the invader. As Zoe continues the search for the rain heron with Ren in tow and her medic, Daniel, tending to both women’s wounds, Arnott describes mythic scenery (“Soon after entering these wild fields the road doglegged, and over this bend Daniel saw the river’s death”). Though the plot doesn’t always hang together, Arnott fascinates with fable-like stories and thoughtful meditations on the consequences of lessons learned too late. The beautiful imagery and magical moments carry the reader through an occasionally bumpy journey.

March 26, 2020
Ren has retreated from the world. After the country is torn apart by a coup, she hides herself away on a mountain, barely seeing another living soul beyond the animals she hunts in order to survive and the man from the village who she sometimes trades with. Over the years she finds not peace, but an equilibrium—until the day the soldiers come to hunt down a creature that surely can’t exist. The Rain Heron is a beautifully told story in four parts, in which the line between reality and myth is impossible to draw. As in his debut novel, Flames, Robbie Arnott writes characters—human and animal alike—that you invest in rapidly, making the twists and turns in their stories feel that much more personal and at times shocking. We don’t see the war directly. Instead we feel its effects through the intimately realised characters, and the way their lives have been redirected and tainted. Arnott expertly navigates the fraught relationships between humans and the natural world, and paints shades of grey into moments that for a lesser writer would be purely black and white. This is a book that is not only a compelling, original read, but one that delivers hard truths that urgently need to be heard. Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor