More than 100 years on from Picnic at Hanging Rock, Australian novelists are still exploring the terror of being lost in the Australian landscape, with many genres now borrowing from what we know as the Australian Gothic. Bronwyn Rivers‘ debut thriller, The Reunion, is one such novel, a mystery with an air of menace throughout as five friends return to a rural property in New South Wales for the ten-year anniversary of the death of their friend Ed.
Ed, along with Charlotte, Alex, Hugh and Jack, were high school friends who all attended the same Sydney boarding school, and though they came from different backgrounds, they found friendship through all being in the same house. Charismatic Ed was undoubtedly their leader; he was school captain too, and popular with girls. His death on an end of school camping trip in the National Park backing onto his parents’ property was a tragedy which has followed his companions ever since. No longer as close as they once were, the quintet are nonetheless bound by the secrets that they have kept since that trip, and by the trauma that has bonded them together.
Charlotte and Hugh, not particularly close before the accident, are now married and expecting a child. Promising student, Jack, is no longer studying medicine, and is on a break from his relationship, wondering what ex-girlfriend Laura thinks of him these days. Laura, however, is dealing with health issues and has other things on her mind. Alex, now working as a social worker, still feels like the odd one out. They have been invited back by Ed’s mother, Martha. Ed’s father has just died in tragic circumstances, and feeling sorry for this older woman on a huge rural property with nothing but her ghosts for company, they agree to go. But right from the offset, things are not as they should be, and soon the five are fighting for survival in a sick game of cat and mouse. They must decide if hanging on to the secrets they have kept from the world – and from one another- are worth their lives.
After a prologue which introduces the cast of characters, the book gets off to a pacy start with chapters alternating in the perspectives of each of the characters. A picture slowly begins to build of who each of the characters seems to be on the outside, and who they are really. The novel shifts back in time at regular intervals, showing the reader key moments in the group’s friendships, not only on the hiking trip, but also at a big party that same year. Not only are our five protagonists revealed to have secret natures, the reader soon realises that Ed is also not as perfect as everyone thinks, and that his charm and charisma might also have been seen by some of the others as manipulative and self-serving. Each time you think that you might have figured out who is to blame for what happened to him, Rivers throws another curveball in the mix, keeping you guessing right until the very end.
This is definitely a novel where plot and setting take centre stage. At times, it felt as if this book was John Marsden’s YA classic, Tomorrow, When the War Began for adults, without a sinister, unnamed enemy. Instead, the danger in The Reunion lies closer to home, as the plot begins to make our increasingly desperate characters turn on, and suspect one another. While the head hopping third person point of view does make it difficult to connect with some of the characters at first, particularly in the prologue, by the time the book really gets going, Rivers has established a very clear sense of who is who, and why they do the things they do. She also cleverly evokes the menace of both the National Park – where climate change has meant that a usually reliable source of water has run dry – and of the homestead, where patchy mobile phone reception and a missing router mean that it’s very easy to feel completely cut off from salvation. The tension in this one ratchets up extremely high. Throw in a rogue snake bite, and you have a recipe for your heart racing.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Bronwyn Rivers’s The Reunion is out now through Hachette Australia. Grab yourself a copy from your local bookstore HERE.
Header Image supplied by Hachette Australia.
