Mantle
Romy Ash
Ultimo Press, RRP $34.99

Review by Wendy Tucker

Romy Ash is a young Australian female author of extraordinary talent. Her first novel, Floundering, published in 2013 was short listed for the Miles Franklin and Commonwealth Book Prizes and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. An amazing accomplishment for a thirty-year-old, first-time author.

Now, thirteen years later she has published her wild, weird, watery and wonderful second novel, Mantle. It is dystopian, Tasmanian gothic (a crowded genre) and driven by climate change, but don’t let that deter you from this complex, marvellous novel. It depicts us and our world under pressure and it’s really about grief, love and the superiority of the natural world.

Ursula is our narrator. She is a 50-year-old academic, a geologist/stratigrapher who studies the earth’s layers and sadly says that we are leaving ‘the plastic layer’. Ursula is childless, intelligent, self-aware and self-deprecating. She is real, funny and food obsessed. Ursula anchors us and the novel in both the science and the surreal. She has returned to this isolated, clifftop, self-built house on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel on Tasmania’s south-east coast to visit her mother. The landscape, the house, the cold and the ever-hungry fire are all characters in this novel.

Ursula’s mother, Delores, is dying because her lungs are failing and Ursula is caring for the mother that she has had little contact with for many years. They both carry the same grief from the accidental death of Ursula’s sister and father. Delores has chosen the simple life and has been ‘prepping’ since the 2000 millennium bug. The distance between mother and daughter closes as death comes nearer.

When the ambulance arrives, both drivers are clothed in Hazmat suits and Delores’s body disappears from the hospital. Something is wrong. The rash that Ursula and, it seems, half the town have developed, refuses to disappear. Ursula and her younger lover awake attached to each other by fine filaments; the rash erupts into clumps of frightening yet beautiful mushrooms. Fungi are proliferating in the warming climate, and their spores are in the air we breathe. Is this a new epoch?

Soon the world is in lockdown again …

Ash divides the novel into sections: Civil, Nautical and Astronomical. These are the phases of twilight before complete darkness.

The last section is Night, and this section will not leave me, at least for a while.

There was one short description that caused my stomach to turn. But it was worth it. Strange, bizarre, beautiful and brilliant.