The Coral Bones

De: E. J. Swift

Narrado por: Anna Burnett, Brigid Lohrey, Kate Winter

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association award for best novel, and the Kitschies Red Tentacle

Marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is racing against time to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, but struggles to fight for a future in a world where so much has already been lost.

Seventeen-year-old Judith Holliman escapes the monotony of Sydney Town during the nineteenth century, when her naval captain father lets her accompany him on a voyage, unaware of the wonders and dangers she will soon encounter.

Telma Velasco is hunting for a miracle in a world ravaged by global heating: a leafy seadragon, long believed extinct, has been sighted. But as Telma investigates, she finds hope in unexpected places.

Past, present and future collide in this powerful elegy to a disappearing world - and vision of a more hopeful future.©2023 E. J. Swift (P)2024 Quercus Editions Limited

Brilliant interferometry of climate grief

“How do you grieve for what is eradicated slowly, and inexorably, over the course of a lifetime? How do you grieve for extinction?”

This book is cli-fi excellence, using three focalisers in three different time periods to create a granular picture of what is lost to runaway coral bleaching extinctions. Moving between the perspectives of a young woman in a colonial society naive to the harms riding alongside the plenitude she discovers, a contemporary scientist grieving through her own breakup at the same time as reefs she tries to save bleach around her, and a mother mourning her lost child in a hellish Anthropocene future; the book builds a holistic, detailed picture between their perspectives of what is lost. Without being didactic about it, it also uses the narrative mechanism to rehearse the processing of grief, and finding reason to continue.

I’ve enjoyed a few excellent sci-fi novels that tell a story across multiple interspersed focalisers in different times - Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass - and it’s interesting how many different things there are to do with the approach. This might be the best, most assured use of it I’ve seen though, with each focaliser realised through a different approach to narrative, creating a deeper picture without needing to converge.

My one reservation is that the narrator reading the Telma chapters is surprisingly ponderous in her line readings, even at the 1.3x speed I normally listen at. It’s not a deal-breakingly bad reading, just something that niggles a little as the future narration drags a bit more than it might need to.

Overall though, this is a brilliantly crafted work that alternates pace and action enough to force you to realise what is already lost, sit with the grief, and feel the glimmers of hope more acutely, without either cheap deus ex machina, or dystopian hopelessness.

I finished it teary and smiling.