To describe a bushfire is to describe a monster. We speak of flanks, fingers, tails and tongues, Chloe Hooper observes in The Arsonist, of a predatory, devouring hunger ... The latest book by the Australian writer tells the story of just one of the Black Saturday bushfires, a blaze deliberately lit on the outskirts of Churchill in the Latrobe Valley — coal country ... With propulsive energy, The Arsonist follows the case against Sokaluk, a 39-year-old former volunteer firefighter, from the arson investigation’s first frantic hours to the courtroom verdict. But first, Hooper takes us into the belly of the beast: birds falling from the sky with their wings burning; beehives combusting from the radiant heat; farewell texts escaping from fire-ravaged homes ... The elemental terror of Black Saturday requires little embellishment, only the quiet dignity of witness. It’s this restraint — as intelligent as it is compassionate — that elevates The Arsonist from slick true-crime procedural to cultural time capsule.
In The Arsonist, Hooper reignites the memories of those cataclysmic events with relentless, devastating effect. Her focus is on one fire, deliberately lit, an 82,000-acre flare-up on the outskirts of Churchill in Central Gippsland ... The message in The Arsonist is muted, its lessons diffuse ... The Arsonist may not provide answers, but it asks disquieting questions. Bearing witness, it reminds us of the victims and the terror, the senselessness of a flame tossed onto a forest floor, and the awful silence of a landscape razed by fire.
Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. But the central character of The Arsonist is Brendan Sokaluk, a shadowy shapeshifter, and the book an inquiry into why he set his hometown ablaze ... If not handled carefully, reconstruction narratives can turn stories into unsolvable puzzles. This is because they derive their narrative coherence from atomised sources that often conflict with each other. While Hooper does allow her multiple characters many digressions, The Arsonist achieves its clarity through strict linear chronology.
What drives people to light bushfires? Spite? Revenge? Psychosis? A fierce need by the luckless and downtrodden to control events for once? Maybe an urge to initiate something elemental and – in this country – even mythical? We might never know the mind of a firebug. But as Australia faces increasingly warm summers in a changing climate, Chloe Hooper attempted to find out ... The Arsonist, by turns a fascinating real-life thriller, police procedural, intense sociological study and the long-overdue story of fire in Australia ... In Hooper's sure hands the grimmest details become exquisite imagery.
Hooper begins with a beautifully poetic, mournful account of the ruin wreaked by the fire – she writes the landscape so very well – before focusing on the police and the investigation that eventually results in the arrest of Sokaluk ... It’s a tough book to read in parts. I think I cried solidly for thirty pages near the beginning as Hooper describes some of the heartbreaking events with stunning, lyrical clarity. But the care she has taken with this story and its people is also care for the reader, who she accompanies on this journey like a close friend. The Arsonist is not just our book of the month; it’s one of the books of the year. Absolutely not to be missed.
In an engrossing report brimming with urgent detail and palpable suspense, Hooper diligently retraces the steps of those investigations. Dividing the book into three sections, the author brings together the findings of crime scene experts, forensic fire scientists, and arson squad authorities, all of whom meticulously scrutinized every possible clue left by a fire in which 'burning birds fell from trees, igniting the ground where they landed.' ... Both pensive and revelatory in the closing pages, the narrative covers Sokaluk’s arson conviction, the community reaction, and the crime’s aftermath. Consistently riveting and never fuzzy on the details, Hooper’s book encompasses the specifics of the fire, its collateral damages, and the troubled mind behind the mayhem. A gripping true-crime chronicle in which the justice is both righteous and agonizing
