In Johanna Bell's debut novel, Department of the Vanishing, the air has fallen quiet. Birds are dying in their millions: magpies, rosellas, honeyeaters, pelicans – all gone. Overheated, infected, eggless. Livers full of pesticides, bellies full of plastic. It's an administrative headache, keeping track of the obliteration.
Welcome to the Department of the Vanishing (DoV): a government office tasked with cataloguing the casualties of the Anthropocene. But there aren't enough resources to record every lost creature, so priorities are set by senior management. The archive keeps things safe – safe from being noticed, from being missed, from being mourned. It is where extinct species come to die a second time.
Our narrator, Ava Wilde, has spent two decades boxing the dead, trying to believe that what she does serves some kind of public good. But something in her has come undone in the DoV's officious tomb. We first meet Ava in a police interrogation room in the summer of 2029, accused of stealing files. What has she tried to set loose, and why? Is it possible to steal something that no longer exists? Who owns a memory once it has been filed away? And why do these questions lead back to Ava's father, a naturalist who vanished 30 years ago while chasing the song of a lyrebird?
Written largely in verse, Bell's novel is not built for tidy elevator pitches; it's the kind of wild little miracle that only exists because of the risk-taking of independent presses. There are historical photographs and mocked-up artefacts, witness statements and field notes, natural history factoids and feather fronds. It's rare – and genuinely thrilling – to encounter a book this formally alive.
There are quibbles: Ava Wilde's name is far too perfect, and her erotic misadventures drift into weary sad-girl territory. Still, Bell's DoV is brilliantly plausible, with its squalid basement office and ever-shrinking budget. The sly terror of the book is never quite knowing when one reality slides into another; it's all so administratively plausible.
