A gripping father-and-son story simmers with brooding and dread

By Daniel HerbornUpdated August 2, 2021 â€" 1.59pmfirst published July 30, 2021 â€" 4.00pm

FICTION
The Others
Mark Brandi
Hachette, $32.99

In his award-winning debut,Wimmera, Mark Brandi showed a veteran’s understanding of how a slow build can engender an almost unbearable level of tension. In The Rip, he channelled that sense of trepidation into a more action-packed plot, bringing a world-weary tone to a portrait of doomed people on the fringe of society.

The Others sees him return to his turf as one of Australia’s foremost purveyors of literary dread. It’s more austere than either previous work, focusing on Jacob, who lives in a shack in the wilderness with only his father for company. Their life is one of grim survival; their time spent hunting for scraps of food and on father-son lessons that are heavy on a fear of the outside world.

Mark Brandi works with a limited palette in his spare, third novel. Credit:

His father tells Jacob that most of society perished in a plague, and now they have to live in a state of constant vigilance of “others” who roam the desolate landscape. Jacob can vaguely remember his mother, who passed away from illness and because “she wouldn’t listen”.

Another ghost in Jacob’s memory is a half-forgotten mention of a commune where the family may have once been sequestered; again, the father won’t explain this in anything other than the most skeletal details.

The father’s educational approach runs to the macabre, such as when he keeps his fingers after lopping them off: “He told me why he put the fingers on the mantel, even though I didn’t ask. Just a reminder. To be careful.”

Gradually, fragments of the older man’s former life emerge, all filtered through Jacob’s wounded, hesitant voice. As he timidly pieces together the past, Jacob also studies an encyclopaedia and confides in his diary, trying to make sense of the murky outside world. He peppers his tentative, exploratory entries with shaky line drawings of the things he sees and imagines, often apologising to the imagined reader for their inaccuracy and vowing to come back to fix them later.

There’s something of the Huck and Pap Finn about the pair, not least the father’s latent tendency to violence. Jacob often notes his “soft eyes” when his temper is rising and has learned to navigate conversations around volatile topics.

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Brandi is working with a limited palette in The Others. The action mostly focuses on only two characters; a self-doubting, naïve narrator with limited life experience and an antagonist loath to string more than a couple of words together.

It’s neither action-packed nor a tale of noise and revelation, but rather an immaculately sustained mood piece. Using hypnotic repetition (haunting images of the father’s gold tooth, ominous gaps in Jacob’s diary) and a fine-tuned accretion of information, the story grips despite its small scale.

The intrigue largely stems from the internal struggle raging under Jacob’s cowed demeanour, whether his curiosity about the world outside their outpost will always be subjugated to his father’s captor-like control of his life.

There are hints in Jacob of nature winning out over nurture; he shows a real tenderness towards the animals on their ramshackle farm and a particular affinity for Daniel, a baby lamb he perceives as a soft-hearted loner. The fledgling attachment brings with it the spectre of loss as foxes begin stalking the animals.

When peals of gunfire and distant wisps of smoke hint at other life in the valley, Jacob’s curiosity about the outside world is ratcheted up. Conversations with his father become increasingly terse as the latter begins going away for longer stretches, ostensibly to get weapons and food, warning Jacob not to venture from his room.

The Others invites readers to wonder whether a child’s innate goodness can survive isolation and indoctrination and what the cost of such turmoil may be. The chilling, bare-bones prose offers an answer.

Mark Brandi is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au).The Age is a festival sponsor.

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