The author of the bestseller Call Me Evie returns with a chilling story inspired by the real-life cult The Family.   

In a small town in rural Victoria, amid oppressive heat and the threat of bushfire, Freya lives the life of a single mother, raising seven-year-old Billy, teaching yoga, and otherwise keeping to herself. If she appears normal to her neighbours, her yoga students and the other school mums, it’s because she works at it. As she explains:

We all act, I’m just better at it than you. You do it when the service station attendant asks how your day is, and you smile and say, Good, thanks, because that’s what’s expected. You’re doing it with every small lie, every interaction in which you must consult that inner ideal version of yourself before you respond. Unconsciously you are always asking, What would a normal person say or do?

Lately Freya’s been on edge, feeling as though someone is watching her. She’s spotted a young couple hanging around her property, near the river. She makes references to her mysterious past, including the loss of her older son and trouble with her ex.

Amy’s life is anything but normal. She lives in the Clearing with her siblings, all nine of them, plus the new arrival, who Amy helped to kidnap from the side of the road. Life in the Clearing is about survival. ‘I have seen my brothers and sisters chasing spiders and eating them,’ Amy says. ‘I have seen children clutching handfuls of grass and chewing on it like cattle.’

JP Pomare’s second novel is a compelling and startling exploration of family, control and violence. Like Emma Cline’s The Girls, a novel loosely based on the Manson Family, In the Clearing takes its inspiration from The Family, an Australian cult. Where the narrative of The Girls fades into anticlimax, however, Pomare draws Freya’s and Amy’s narratives together masterfully in a series of unpredictable twists propelled forward by ever-mounting tension.

Led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the 1970s and 80s, The Family was accused of imprisoning children and brainwashing them through the use of drugs and physical punishment, as well as forcing them to dress alike and dye their hair blond to better resemble its leader. Pomare frames the book with an epigraph from Hamilton-Byrne: ‘I love children.’

The leader of the Clearing is Adrienne, who Amy refers to as ‘mother’. A charismatic leader, Adrienne preaches that she is the reincarnation of Christ.

Pomare’s debut, the psychological thriller Call Me Evie, won the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel. In the Clearing continues exploring psychological manipulation and its effects, this time on a larger scale.

Amy’s manipulation is immediately clear. The adults around her orchestrate her role in the kidnapping of her newest sister. Amy is 15, but has none of the typical rebellious teen in her – she knows if she disobeys, she’ll be realigned. Maybe she’ll be locked in the Shed in the baking heat, or put in the Hole. When Adam tells her what to do, or when Adrienne and her followers gather around her and shout commands, she obeys. But later, in her journal, she questions herself:

Which is worse?

A – Keeping a secret from your mother.

B – Looking away when someone does something wrong.

C – Causing pain to another human being and enjoying it.

D – Doing something horrible because someone told you to.

E – All of the above.

One of the underlying questions Pomare poses so successfully is what we could be brought to do, if put in Amy’s position.

Freya’s story is a slower boil. She struggles to manipulate the world’s perception of her as she goes about her daily routine with increasing anxiety. Flowers show up on her doorstep, but no note is left. She passes the same van parked on her street for days in a row. Despite her safety precautions, including a trained rottweiler and metal roller shutters on her windows and doors, her sense of threat deepens.

Yet there’s more to Freya than just a worried mum. As she notes:

People don’t need to know about the violence beneath the surface, the coils of razor wire turning inside like the inner workings of a watch.

Pomare’s prose is crisp and fast-paced. Both Freya and Amy narrate in the present tense, intermittently interrupted by Amy’s journal entries, in which she describes events in the Clearing. Secondary characters are well drawn, with the exception of Freya’s son Billy, who feels like a stand-in for any ordinary seven year old. He likes to paint, has nightmares, and is shy around strangers. The rottweiler, Rocky, shows more personality than Billy, eagerly climbing onto Freya’s bed when she lets him and chasing after rocks thrown into the river. This isn’t Billy’s story, though; it’s Freya’s and Amy’s. Through it all, in the background, are Adrienne and her followers, cult members who think of themselves as a family, and are willing to do anything to protect and obey their leader.

The triumph of In the Clearing is its surprising climax, and the way Pomare turns the tables on the reader, raising the question of what any one of us would do to protect our own families – however we define them.

JP Pomare In the Clearing Hachette 2019 PB 336pp $32.99

Ashley Kalagian Blunt is the author of My Name is Revenge, a finalist in the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing also appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, the Australian, the Big Issue, and Kill Your Darlings. Find her at ashleykalagianblunt.com

You can buy In the Clearing from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Anne | Hamilton-Byrne, JP | Pomare, Ngaio Marsh Award, The Clearing, the Family