Lost in fiction, coming back to the real world of politics is a jolt

Just last week, finishing Sally Gardner's The Weather Woman, I emerged from its world of 18th century London and from the company of its young, female, supernaturally gifted protagonist Neva. Emerging, blinking, I found myself abruptly, joltingly, shockingly in the 21st century non-fiction Australia of Peter Dutton.

I had barely got my present-day bearings when that day's 21st-century ABC news began reporting Peter Dutton's declaration that he and his front bench Liberals are to "actively" campaign for a "no" to the Voice.

Appalled by the Machiavellian slime of Dutton's partisanship, I looked urgently for the next novel I could take a flying leap into so as to escape the sordid realpolitik of this Australia. More of my inspired escapological choice of book in a moment.

Dutton's "no" zealotry surely means that all hopes of a civil and harmonious public conversation during the Voice campaign are lost. If the coming months of Voice referendum campaign are to be brutalising and soul-bruising what are we to do, those of us easily brutalised and bruised?

Perhaps those of us who usually follow news and current affairs with a rapt intensity should consider turning, now, to several months of a kind of media-repelling news-denying hibernation-dormancy.

The voices of the worst Australians, their racism often blatantly naked or seemingly artfully costumed as something else (Peter Dutton's costume is as transformingly theatrical and gorgeous as any I have just marvelled at in the Australian Ballet's sumptuous production of Don Quixote) are set to clang loudly across the land.

I am elderly and not as emotionally/ideologically robust as I was. Already I find Peter Dutton's dubious statements (especially the claim that Voice is somehow "Canberra's Voice") shivering my mental timbers.

One had hoped for a better, more kindly, more bipartisan, less immature Australia than this one. These Duttonisms, the disappointments they kindle in an Australian idealist's heart and soul, have a strangely viral, morale-enfeebling quality. It is not unlike what an attack of COVID does to enfeeble the body and befog the mind.

No wonder then that at politically pestilential times like these the mind turns to ways of minimising one's exposure to the mediaborne viral particles of the Voice campaign.

And so as canvassed above one attractive option for thinking, reading Australians is to blot out all news and to instead go and get immersed, happily lost in novels.

I am blessed with an aptitude, a talent for losing myself in books, thanks to an early childhood in which storybooks ruled because the Great Satan, the great distraction of TV, had not reached my remote and "backward" corner of civilisation.

And so today, thanks to Rijn Collins' just-published novel Fed To Red Birds (my urgent choice of reading to succeed The Weather Woman) I am spending several days in enchanted Iceland. Here I am also living in the life and mind of Elva, the author's young, female, Australian-Icelandic protagonist. Elva has xylophagia and is a passionate taxidermist.

Living and lost in this book I have only put it down for long enough to write this column, and am already missing Iceland and Elva terribly.

Collins is so very good at the description of Iceland's unearthly landscapes and of its forbidding weather that for this reader the illusion of being there, in Iceland, is almost complete. I feel I am typing this with frostbitten fingers while being watched by trolls.

But I have almost finished writing now. I'll soon plunge back into the tale.

MORE WARDEN:

I'll rejoin Elva in her confusions, dreams and obsessions. I'll walk Reykjavik's dark and frosty streets with her. We'll go to noisy bars and parties together confident (what rapture!) that Peter Dutton and other heroes of the malignant "no" (giants like Pauline Hanson, Alan Jones, Tony Abbott) will never cross Icelandic minds let alone come up in conversation.

Collins' Iceland is 16,000km from Australia and a million kilometres from caring about Australia's chilly, callous and racist politics.

There is no more danger of meeting Peter Dutton and his "no"-mongering Australian ilk here in Collins' Reykjavik than there will be of bumping into those disappointing brutes in the 19th century Moscow and St Petersburg of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, my designated next escape into the warm bosom of fiction.