Romy Ash’s second novel MANTLE (Ultimo Press 2025) explores our natural environment, community, isolation, fear, infection, love, desire, death, decay, ends and beginnings. MANTLE is full of contradictions: it is lovely literary prose yet highly engaging and authentic. Its characters are facing illness and death yet simultaneously chasing passion and new love. The narrative is for the most part realistic, yet towards the end a touch of fantasy or magical realism or otherworldliness creeps into the story, framed in such a way that we feel this could really happen, human life could become this way, nature might interweave with humanity in a manner yet unheard of, pandemics and disease could occur in many forms.
At the heart of the story is Ursula, a 50-year-old woman with the chutzpah and ‘no shits given’ attitude of a women of a certain (wise) age. She’s a geologist, particularly interested in ‘dividing history into segments and reading the Earth’s depths’, as she studies stones and sand and the many layers of rock beneath our feet. Ursula travels to Tasmania to care for her dying mother, who has contracted a strange illness with rare symptoms. A simple rash becomes something more sinister.
And the rash / virus / disease spreads.
Ursula is isolated in her mother’s house, her grief manifesting in various strange ways. She becomes involved with a much younger man and the two inhabit a messy, entangled relationship that has no name.
Meanwhile, news of spread of the disease reaches them sporadically – it is in the next town, across the island, on the mainland. Ursula’s state of grieving while simultaneously living in the house full of her mother’s personal belongs (her tea, her books, her remnants) prevents her from becoming fully engaged in what appears to be both a terrible infectious pandemic, but also one strangely accepted by the locals.
It is at this point in the novel that realism touches the fantastical. I won’t give away any more information (no spoilers) but the symptoms of this illness, its webbing across human and plant, its exotic power, its worrying metamorphosis reminded me very much of Kris Kneen’s writing, where the pragmatic and real is burnished by the unimaginable, the creepy, the incomprehensible.
This is a book about climate change, grief, relationships, connections and all that we don’t understand about our world and our place in it.