INGA SIMPSON The Thinning Reviewed by Ann Skea

The new novel from the author of Understory explores what happens when mining dramatically changes life on Earth.

We haven’t always lived on amber alert, ready to run. When Dianella was the photographer in residence and Dad the head astronomer, we used to have a house, like regular people.

But since the mining accident that Finlay (Fin) says put the moon’s cycles ‘all out of whack’ and disrupted the tides and the rhythms of life on Earth, many things have changed.

Fin remembers the observatory at Siding Spring in the Warrumbungle National Park, 500 kilometres from Sydney, as ‘a whole community’: a place where she and the other children who lived there would pretend that the telescopes – Huntsman, Solaris, Schmidt, Sky Mapper and the others – were characters in their play, and where she had dreamed of being an astronaut:

Sitting in the prime focus cage of the main telescope was a lot like flying a rocket ship, sailing through the stars into infinity. Our technician, Blair, would move the telescope faster than he needed, to accentuate the feeling. Even walking around the catwalk inside the dome was like being in a spacecraft.

Now, childhood is over and Fin and her parents, plus a few others from the abandoned observatory, are hiding out in the national park, always alert for the government agents, the military, the vans of tech company MuX, and the national park’s rangers, who patrol the park and hunt out ‘the Illegals’ who have chosen to remain off-grid. There are helicopters, drones, informers, security cameras, and the constant need to be ready to ‘scatter deeper into the park’.

Animals and plants have changed, species are adapting or dying out and ‘survivors are shape shifters’, as Fin says, but she still feels the power of the special places where ‘the membrane between our world and another is thin’, and where there is a closeness to nature that you could maybe ‘step through to the other side’. She knows the sky, the constellations, and the stories she has heard from Des and from Uncle Nate, who had been a national park ranger, caring for Country.

Fin’s world has been ‘shaped by the stars, and the images of them’. She feels close to the Dark Emu that spans ‘the stars and dust lanes of the Milky Way’, ‘flying through the sky, changing with the seasons’, but light pollution means that the sky is no longer dark, and the ‘second generation’ strings of satellites launched by MuX and tracked on photographs by Dianella, are making it ever lighter and further disrupting nature.

Dianella and the others from the illegal observatory group are planning to return to the observatory and ‘commandeer the main telescope’ for some kind of ‘business’, which will be timed to coincide with the total eclipse due to happen ‘the day after tomorrow’. Fin is not told what this business is, but she is tasked with getting across rough country to the top of Mount Kaputar, where she must climb the radio tower and signal them with a laser light at the moment of complete eclipse. Her hazardous journey, avoiding detection among the crowds who will be congregating at Kaputar to see the eclipse, becomes a thrilling minute-by-minute countdown from chapter to chapter until the end of the book.

To make things more difficult, Fin, is given charge of a young ‘Incomplete’, ‘Terry’, whose parents she and Dianella watch being captured, but who manages to escape. The Incompletes are a new generation of humans that has evolved with eyes and brains made for staring at screens: ‘they are short-sighted and ill equipped for the outdoors’, and they are unable to reproduce – ‘not with each other anyway’, but can reproduce if mated with a ‘Complete’. Terry, who is rescued by Fin’s group, is, it seems, wanted alive by the authorities:

‘You should just go. It’s me they’re after,’ Terry says. Their forehead is creased, their mouth miserable.

‘You? Why would they want you?’ I say.

Dianella stares at Terry. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘To study me.’

The Thinning is beautifully written and Inga Simpson’s storytelling is rich and deeply infused with her sensitivity to the world of nature. She manages to capture Fin’s character and voice, to bring to life the small group she belongs to, and to pace the story through ‘the degrees of separation’ that for Fin’s family mean:

… the sun dropping, six degrees at a time, in thirty-minute intervals, from golden hour into blue hour, through the three stages of twilight, until the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon, leaving us in true astronomical dark – when the galactic core visibility begins.

That we are already losing this astronomical dark to light pollution, and that nature is already disrupted by this, is the book’s underlying warning, but Inga Simpson is too good a writer to be didactic. Instead, she weaves a tale that draws you into the drama of Fin’s journey and the fragile beauty of the rugged land through which she treks.

If Fin’s astrological descriptions are sometimes a little too detailed, she makes up for it in the poetry of her brushes with animals, her feeling for the land, and in her thoughts:

The air is so damp, droplets drip from my hair and nose. Ribbons of bark rattle all around us. The moss breathes.

… the delicate spiral of a snail’s shell, like an unfolding fern frond. Like the Milky Way, our spiral galaxy, expanding in its own grand time.

What if the thresholds I long to cross are not portals to another dimension, but the capacity to fully inhabit our own? A way of circling back, into ourselves. Our best selves. What if we could see a way to make a new world, where all beings, no matter how fragile, could thrive?

Altogether, The Thinning is a gripping and enjoyable tale full of the beauty that we might lose if we are not more careful to protect the fragile world we live in.

In her Author’s Note, Simpson outlines some of the devastating impacts of fracking, and the dangers inherent in the proposed mining of gas seams in the half-million hectares of the New South Wales Pilliga Forest. This area is ‘one of the most important areas for biodiversity in eastern Australia’, and the scheme is being opposed by the Gomeroi community, farmers and environmental groups, whose land would be affected.

Inga Simpson The Thinning Hachette 2024 PB 320pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: astronomy, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, environment, mining, Siding Spring observatory, speculative fiction, Warrumbungle National Park