As the winner of the Tasmanian Literary Awards 2025, I was expecting something rare and raw from Johanna Bell’s latest novel. And that was exactly what I found with Department of the Vanishing. Strange and sad, it is a tale of this time of extinction, broken yet beautiful.
Our protagonist, Ava, is surrounded by the long dead. As an archivist at the titular Department of the Vanishing, she files away information on the lost and lingering species of the world – poems, paintings and factsheets. The novel is set just a few years from our own time, and there is a lot to file. So much birdsong, lost forever in the depths of the archive. As Ava files record after record, she must confront not only the loss off all these creatures, but her own losses.
Department of the Vanishing is a story about grief – about watching your world wither around you, and the weight of what that death leaves behind. It echoes what many are feeling right now, watching animals going extinct or teeter close to its edge. It’s about piecing together those fragments of life, and trying to make something new from them. It is fitting, then, that this story is told through those same fragments.
Poetry seemingly from the mind of our protagonist is interspersed with emails, interviews, quotes, photographs and lists, each marked with an archival date and peppered with redactions, stamps and notes. Just as our protagonist must sift through her archival materials, so must we – and together, make something from these disparate shards. Elements of the story are abandoned and returned to again and again, until they can be understood. Shards of the narrative are brought into focus, while others are left unsaid, yet clear. The result is a well-crafted yet piecemeal novel, where the taped-together edges add a vitality and raw desperation. It is the effort we all must make, to make meaning after loss.
There is an ethereal and enthralling quality to this book, one which makes it all the more interesting but also at times makes the book feel ungrounded – it so often feels adrift in time and place, despite being so modern in other ways. Similar stems from the contrast of materials and their pattern of connection and disconnection. This approach is intriguing, but also makes it an acquired taste.
It requires you to delve into this archive of a book, to sift through its heavy pages, to find meaning for yourself. It is far from the typical, and yet, there were moments where I wished it had pushed even harder, had delved even deeper into this strange method of storytelling. Still, as it stands, Department of the Vanishing is a story remarkable in its rarity, in its vivid contrasts and unpolished emotions.
Let us hope that, unlike the birds our protagonist so grieves for, this novel will not be the next to be archived away forever.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell is out now from Transit Lounge. Find a copy at your local bookstore HERE.
Header image provided by Transit Lounge.
