'Soldiers have come to the village.
Ren looked up, avoiding Barlow’s words, resting her eyes on the pines that crowded the sky, swamp-green, thick, heavy with resin that stuck to skin and cleared throats, nostrils, eyes.
Barlow was sitting on a large rock. When she didn’t answer, he kept talking.
They’re after something—they won’t say what. But it’s up here. On the mountain.
'REN lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission.
'As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In an unnamed land under the thrall of a mysterious coup, mountain-dweller Ren wants only to live off the grid, undisturbed by human contact. Ren’s familiarity with the natural world becomes a liability when a band of soldiers comes seeking information that only she can provide: the whereabouts of a fabled bird with the ability to make it rain.' (Introduction)
'Set in an unnamed country that has recently undergone a violent coup, Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is a novel of a land suffused with wild animal magic: a heron that can create vast storms; a species of squid whose ink has miraculous properties and must be harvested through sanguine ritual. Ren, seeking to escape the world, has for the past half-decade made her home in a small, wild corner of this place. Soon, though, her isolation is disturbed by a group of soldiers led by the charismatic and ruthless Lieutenant Harker. The soldiers are on a search for a rain heron, thought by many to be a myth. Harker, sensing that Ren knows more than she’s letting on, begins a campaign of terror; her coercion of Ren takes the form of strategic despoliation of the wilderness – Ren’s home. Ren is shocked by the soldier’s callousness: “Ren had seen the way she stalked around the mountain, unmoved by the trees, the air, the staggering slopes and the cellophane streams, the huge and harsh beauty of it all. For Harker, the mountain was no different to a car park, an office, the bottom of the ocean; she would use it, take what she needed, burn it down, dance gracefully in the ashes and never think of it again.”' (Introduction)
Robbie Arnott on The Rain Heron
Marie Matteson
(interviewer),
2020
23470585
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Robbie Arnott chats with Readings bookseller Marie Matteson about his second novel, The Rain Heron. This conversation was recorded online over Skype during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary)
