book: The Lost Man (2018) by Jane Harper

I hugely enjoyed Jane Harper’s first novel, The Dry, then enjoyed her second, Force of Nature, even more than that. I think her third, The Lost Man, somehow manages to be the best of the three. I’m awestruck by the talents of this UK/Australian author.

The setting is the Australian Outback, a region where the population is so thin and elements of the environment so hostile that even just suffering a car breakdown can represent a sentence of death by heat and dehydration. Something like that seems to have happened to cattle rancher Cameron Bright, whose body is found essentially baked in the lee of an old monument on his land, the Stockman’s Grave. A flattened-out circle in the dry soil around the gravestone betrays how Cameron, in his final hours, despairingly tried to use the marker’s shadow as a means of mitigating the unremitting heat of the sun.

But too many things just don’t add up. In particular, Cameron’s car is parked some little distance away — too far for him to have safely walked to it — and the liquid supplies that might have saved him are intact. There’s plenty of gas in the tank. Besides, why was he at the Stockman’s Grave in the first place when he was due to meet his younger brother, Bub, elsewhere?

Our main viewpoint character for the ensuing tale is Cameron’s older and partially estranged brother Nathan, a man who’s an outcast in the region because of a single, stupid spur of the moment decision he made years ago. It’s tempting to think of Nathan as the lost man of the novel’s title, but, as we learn, there are other candidates for the post.

The three brothers — Nathan, Cameron and the much younger “afterthought,” Bub — had a fairly hellish childhood thanks to their violent, rage-prone brute of a father, Carl. Their mother, Liz, suffered alongside them from Carl’s fists and furies. Luckily Carl died a while back in a car accident that almost killed Liz; thereafter, aside from the remote Nathan, the Brights seemed to be living on an easier footing. Cameron was the family mainspring and the local go-to good guy. Bub was a bit of a wastrel but good at heart. Liz was a revered matriarch. Everyone warmed to Cameron’s wife Ilse and their two cute daughters. And then there was Harry the stockman, theoretically an employee but in practice everybody’s favorite uncle.

Who could have wanted to disrupt that scene? Who could have wanted Cameron dead, and why? Or could Cameron possibly have chosen to commit a particularly bizarre and miserable form of suicide? On the face of it, the whole affair seems completely enigmatic.

But then, in typical Harper fashion, bits of the “established truth” begin to flake off to reveal a reality that isn’t quite the way we thought it was. I can’t go into too many details about these revelations because the slow shifting of our perceptions of the reality is what gives this superbly constructed and controlled novel much of its undoubted power. Some of the revelations about the backstory involve Nathan himself, who emerges as a different and rather more admirable character than the one we’d (and he’d) assumed him to be. And some of those revelations about him and his relationship to the local community are a surprise even to Nathan . . .

There’s a decided atmosphere of grimness about The Lost Man, but please don’t let that observation put you off it. The grimness is born from the harshness of the setting and the corresponding inflexibility of some of that setting’s occupants. But it’s alleviated by the splendid characters whom Harper conjures up to be our companions as the various strands of her tragedy unweave. I found myself desperately caring about the fates of Nathan, Ilse, Liz, the kids and the rest, even including some of the peripheral characters, such as the backpacker Katy. And Harper’s prose is mesmerizing: she has complete command of her art, and I can’t think of a single dissonant turn of phrase in the novel. The Lost Man is kind of long to be read at a sitting, but I’d be surprised if their aren’t countless people who’ve done exactly that.

A massively rewarding novel, in other words, one that transcends all attempts at easy genre categorization (and really shouldn’t have any such lazy descriptions applied to it), and one that I’m sure I’ll be remembering and relishing for years to come.