Rogernomics come home to roost
Feral City
By Rosie Scott
William Heinemann. $19.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
There is a future. Today's comfort becomes tomorrow's memory. Rosie Scott's new work is a novel, not of fantasy, but of extrapolation uncomfortably close to the present.
The horror of this future place is seeded in the crude merchandising of today's economic czars. Set in New Zealand a few years hence, this is Rogernomics come home to roost. Even libraries have been privatised.
Feral City is a city without promise peopled by homeless strays. The dominant life form is an underclass of violent gangs and drug addicts. Long gone is the welfare state. A bleak and unforgiving wasteland this surely is.
Determined to recapture the contentment of her past, one woman convinces her sister to reopen the family bookstore. To this bower she brings literature culled from the surrounding decay. Compared to her neighbours, who just subsist, her passion to preserve published script turns her into a latter-day urban guerilla.
At home among the accumulated texts she fusses over her sister, who is not so enamoured with these pursuits. This second woman ministers to the destitute, ladling soup or proffering blankets with the commitment of a cadre. She is also a rabble rouser who is organising a mass rally of the homeless.
Of course, the insolvent suburbia of this future place is only a mirror of Rio or Manila or Melbourne without the rooming house shelters, and we are separated from it only by a succession of surplus national budgets. Scott's novel is keener on the quiet intimacies of two sisters each differently optimistic and in the warmth of their relationship feeds a story of quiet comfort.
For a stark read peppered with foreboding, Feral City gets you wondering. It is not as complex as her earlier novel, Glory Days, but it feeds off the same muster of spent lives. While we may joke that the last person leaving New Zealand should turn off the lights — and Rosie Scott now lives here — a city of such destitution really isn't so difficult to imagine nor so easy to escape.