Kiran Dass is blown away by a new eco-thriller
Kirsten McDougall’s novel She’s a Killer is such an engrossing page-turner that 200-odd pages passed me by in a flurry before I even realised. And the action hadn’t even started yet. It’s no mean feat to sustain a reader’s attention over 399 pages but McDougall does just that by smartly eking out tension and deftly unfolding the narrative at a sly pace, all the while keeping us on our toes. I never quite knew where she was about to take us and it’s a heart-pumping thrill of a ride from start to finish.
Pitched as an “eco thriller”, it's set in Wellington in the imminent future. The sky and air are grey, the cold wind “makes you want to kill yourself” and the world is on the brink of collapse. Welcomed by the New Zealand government in a bid to ease debt levels, “wealthugees” are flocking to Aotearoa after their own countries are flooded, burning, or in drought. Fleeing civil wars and useless governments, their wealth affords them the privilege to settle here and create glossy utopias in the form of safe boltholes. This is all of course, close-to-the-bone. The population has increased by half a million amid violent protests where wealthugees are shot and the police are gunned up. Sirloin will cost you a vital organ while a whole chook goes for $42. Twelve items at the bougie supermarket clock in at $343.
Our compelling anti-heroine is the spiky Alice, who is only 37-years-old but is the quintessential Generation X slacker - her cynicism is like a protective shell. For the past 15 years she has worked a banal job in enrolments at the university where she was hired to develop an entire system used for forecasting. She likens it to being a modern shoveller of proverbial shit. “I knew it wasn’t as bad as working directly with raw sewage but it was meaningless and definitely less useful than actual shit shovelling,” she explains. Alice is very funny and a beguilingly complex and askew character. She’s smart, manipulative, stubborn, immature and lacks empathy. Despite all this, she is intriguing and likeable. McDougall has created a believable and nuanced character.
After burning down her family home at the age of seven under the instruction of her haranguing imaginary friend/inner voice Simp, Alice’s mother takes her for an IQ test. Maddeningly, the result is 159 - one painful point under the threshold for genius. This “near genius” status and unrealised potential is something that seems to constantly haunt Alice throughout her life. Later as an adult, Simp taunts her that she can’t even calculate the square root of 762 anymore. They share a co-dependence. While Alice would probably like to turn the volume down on Simp’s noisy and invasive berating, there’s also a sense that Simp is really the only loyal and reliable figure in her life. Alice’s paranoid mother lives upstairs, but they have a frosty dynamic and only communicate via Morse code - a mode of communication devoid of subtext.
Alice seems to give up too easily on herself. When she wanted to study for a career as a psychologist, she wasn’t accepted into the course because while she’s brilliant, she is immature. Instead of waiting a year and reapplying like anyone else would, Alice leaves a shit in the professor’s letterbox. It’s easy to understand why she’s seen as childish. Her emotional immaturity is also evident when she meets slick wealthugee Pablo. She naively thinks he wants to be her boyfriend but he ambushes Alice’s life by paying her handsomely to look after his fifteen-year-old “daughter” Erika, who with an IQ of 162 and artfully blended eyeshadow is an actual genius. As things become turbo-charged about halfway through, She’s a Killer feels like a literary action thriller with flashes of confronting realism and perfectly placed comic timing. It’s a blast to read and I bet McDougall had fun writing it.
But everything is still freighted with anxiety about the impending collapse of civilisation. And there’s a feeling that the longer emergencies go on for, the more they just feel like normal, daily life. Alice wonders why she bothers to wear sunscreen because it’s not as if she’s going to live to see 40. There’s a sharp tone of paranoia too, heightened by a distrust of a government who indulges wealthy people while inequality is rife, and non-violent protests are held by iwi over former DOC land being shamelessly sold off to investors. It’s a terrifying time of third wave colonialism and theft.
Alice knows she lacks empathy but what is interesting too is how just when we underestimate her ability to read people, she will make an insightful observation, an understanding of quiet shifts in behaviour. When her prepper friend Amy becomes distant, Alice can sense a turning in her friend, “very subtle like a leaf beginning to die, though you wouldn’t yet know it to look at it.” She’s a Killer is full of beautiful observations like this.
McDougall took the coveted top honours for this year’s Sunday Star-Times short story competition with her taut and quietly menacing piece "Walking Day" which has shades of Shirley Jackson’s bleak masterpiece "The Lottery". As with that story, the action in She’s a Killer unfolds at an expertly dextrous pace. She's a thoughtful writer, too, and I can only imagine the time she has spent polishing, examining, plotting and thinking about this novel’s world, narrative drive and characters. She successfully places us squarely in this realist-dystopian environment which comes to life thanks to her attentive descriptions. Even the way she writes about air and light, or the way a silent airless room feels and sounds, are remarkably vivid. She’s on fire.
She’s A Killer by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
