Author Kate Mildenhall’s novels feature strong female protagonists faced with challenging personal and often also social dilemmas, centred within the broader spectrum of what is going on in the world at the time. Her third novel, The Hummingbird Effect (Simon and Schuster 2023) does all this and more, portraying a writer on steroids who has set out to create a masterpiece of characterisation and setting and plot so unwieldy it is hard to believe she has pulled it off. But she not only pulls it off, she succeeds in this ambitious venture, producing not one story but four, set in different times, which could each almost be read independently, but which ultimately come together in small, subtle and satisfying ways throughout the book.
This is a skilled and talented writer dedicated to creating believable worlds, compelling characters, engaging plot lines and authentic settings of time and place. Her sentences are literary – beautiful word-pearls matched together by colour and size, but the plot is pacy and page-turning and Mildenhall does not miss a beat in pulling the reader forward inexorably towards the conclusion or resolution of each of the four narratives. The writing is tense, taut, gripping, soft and sexy, tantalising, emotionally harrowing and poignant.
Mildenhall always includes some aspect of climate change or the environment in her stories and The Hummingbird Effect spotlights her interest in this area.
We meet Peggy, lucky enough to have a job as a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks in Footscray in Melbourne during the Depression in 1933. The work is relentless but not as confronting as the jobs of the slaughtermen who work under the pressure of both time and the possibility of the introduction of machinery to replace them. The shadow of another great war is on the horizon. One of the slaughtermen, Jack, notices Peggy, and she notices him, and nobody knows if this is a good or bad thing.
How is it possible for Peggy’s life to be connected to Hilda almost 100 years later, an elderly lady locked in Covid isolation in a nursing home, becoming more and more disconnected from her family (and perhaps from reality) every day. In these sections, Mildenhall excels in capturing the zeitgeist of the very centre of the Covid trauma, including nurses’ notes and long, rambling, unpunctuated paragraphs that echo every mantra and rule and voice of despair we all heard during those few years about infection and masks and numbers and for the greater good and deaths and vaccines and conspiracy theories and isolation and medication and more numbers.
The narrative of 2031 concerns La and Cat, a couple who work shifts in warehouses that demand impossible outputs and offer unreachable rewards. Freezing their eggs seems a reasonable option but what are their rights once this precious commodity is handed over? And how can AI be using someone’s voice without permission or payment? This is the near future, recognisable yet also different, more regulated, more frightening, less secure.
Maz and her younger sister Onyx feature in a much-changed world in 2181, where climate change has caused the seas to rise, with most of our current cities well underwater. They travel as divers with a group led by the charismatic JP, who insists he is going to undo the damage done to the earth and find a solution. They dive the wrecks of buildings and infrastructure, bringing up whatever they find: plastics, metals, anything that has survived the salt water. Most of it is destroyed by JP; it seems he is searching for a particular valuable commodity, although he won’t disclose what that is. But with all communications gone and JP’s community isolated and alone, Maz and Onyx have no choice but to go along with his increasingly erratic and dangerous demands. Until they realise that perhaps not is all as it seems; that maybe there are ‘Others’, other people, other groups, existing outside their experience, who view the world very differently than JP and his entourage.
Interspersed intermittently are chapters called ‘Before, Now, Next’, a sort of ambitious, omnipotent voice that defies explanation or description.
Mildenhall’s writing is assured, confident, playful, engrossing and evocative. Her ability to switch between genres (historical, dystopian, contemporary) within the one novel is extraordinary as the reader seamlessly travels from place to place, and from time to time, without missing a step. There are beautifully polished literary sentences alongside rough and authentic dialogue. Familiar societal issues sitting with historical knowledge, alongside futuristic imaginings. Much planning and wrangling has gone into this book, and Mildenhall has achieved something quite remarkable – a genre-bending novel with relatable characters and more than enough plot threads to please a range of readers. If you enjoy experimental writing that is edgy and ambitious, writing that offers you something different, but you still enjoy a read that is page-turning, intensely thought-provoking, and made up in part of almost poetic-like language, you will love this rollercoaster of a ride, the author’s most accomplished novel yet.