Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens vividly, with a shipwrecked woman named Rowan washing up on Shearwater, a remote island off the coast of Antarctica. She is nursed to health by the island’s caretakers — Dominic Salt and his children, Raff, Fen and Orly, the last inhabitants of an abandoned research base and seed bank — but her unexplained arrival soon upsets the Salt family’s delicate balance, which is already strained by grief amid a series of personal and professional disasters.
Dominic, his family and the precious seeds they have been safeguarding for the past eight years are meant to be retrieved by ship six weeks after Rowan’s arrival, a timeline they’re unable to accelerate after their radio is destroyed. As her injuries heal, Rowan pursues the secret agenda that brought her to Shearwater, while also joining the Salts in their increasingly desperate bid to secure the seed vault and the botanical diversity it preserves.
Fierce cold and wind are a constant threat, and the sea is rising so quickly that Shearwater’s beaches are collapsing, endangering the native seals and penguins as well as the base’s buildings. (Also, there might be ghosts.) It’s a rare novel that has so many simultaneous sources of trouble, and it’s to McConaghy’s credit that her plot’s many interlocking escalations only rarely seem forced. But even when the action veers toward the melodramatic, it feels fitting enough: Should we be surprised when a tale about family bonds and doomed love at the end of the world occasionally becomes a melodrama?
In her author’s note, McConaghy recounts visiting the real-life Australian research base on Macquarie Island, a place she calls “surely one of the most precious in the world.” Even as she borrowed its details for her Shearwater, McConaghy says her experience on Macquarie obligated her to render “the truth of the island’s rich flora, its extraordinary wildlife and its unique climate.” Indeed, “Wild Dark Shore” abounds with evocative nature writing, including precocious Orly’s moving monologues about the dandelion, the buzzy burr, the dinosaur tree and other model specimens of natural resilience.
At 9, Orly has lived nearly his entire life on Shearwater; whatever future comes for the Salts and the imperiled wider world they’ll soon rejoin, it’s young Orly who may live to see the worst of it. Perhaps his Antarctic childhood will help him withstand the inexorable losses to come. Perhaps he’ll have to remake himself in the face of grief as Rowan and his father and siblings already have. If so, he may be buoyed by his many examples of nature’s perseverance, like his beloved mangrove seeds that transform as they migrate, seeking an environment where they might thrive: “Will you change shape and put down roots?” Orly asks. “Or carry on in search of somewhere better?”
The Salts and Rowan cannot hope to stay on Shearwater, but where should they go, and with whom? As the climate crisis accelerates, the assurance of loss may make retreat ever more attractive, even if it costs us connection with the human and nonhuman worlds we’ve loved. In “Wild Dark Shore,” we’re shown why a person might withdraw from the messiness of life after tragedy and trauma: “It’s not a good idea to fall in love,” Rowan warns Fen, “not with people and not with places.” The novel also offers its injured characters a path back to connection and community, a risk McConaghy argues must be worth taking, no matter how fraught the future, no matter how temporary the family. As Rowan reflects later in the novel: “What is the use of safety if it deprives you of everything else?”
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