Review: Hydra by Adriane Howell

Hydra begins in a forest at night, someone running through it, chased by a man. She climbs a tree and is shot out of it; military jets fly overhead. Is this a premonition of a dystopian future, or an inciting incident? The answer doesn’t reveal itself for a while. Next we meet Anja, a 31-year-old administrator at an auction house in Melbourne, expert in mid-century modern. Anja has recently returned from a trip to Hydra in Greece with her husband, although her husband didn’t come back with her (he’s alive, although you may wonder).

When Anja spectacularly wilds out at work and loses her job, she finds herself buying a severely isolated property near the sea that was once part of a naval base, HMAS Hydra. But she may have got more than she bargained for: someone leaves an enormous shit on her porch; Anja senses she’s be watched. Interwoven excerpts from a 1985 investigation by Lieutenant Brendan Quartermain reveal this is not the first time strange things have happened on the property.

Hydra is a pleasingly many-headed novel, where quite a lot of things are possible, and where its many meanderings might lead to toothy jaws or peter out into nothing; even the mythic creature of the title eventually gives way to another lurking in the shadows. As Anja rewilds herself she reveals more of the events that have made her who she is: her mother who died a year before her wedding; the Danish man who fathered her age 19 to a much older woman; the disastrous or perhaps liberatory White Lotus-esque holiday to Greece where “the confines in which I’d once functioned in the world — rules and schemas: moral, social, aesthetic, conceptual self — had eroded into the Aegean”. Anja is drawn the to the Jungian undercurrents that shape her life; she developed a new taxonomy for antiques that would place them in categories according to their emotional and psychological function (“Department of the Beast Within”, “Department of Ancient Self”). She senses the things that are latent in objects:

I poured two spoonfuls of loose-leaf tea into a George IV silver pot that had belonged to my grandmother … It occurred to me, rubbing the teapot like a genie lamp, that other than these details I knew nothing of [my grandparents]. With my mother’s death their history, mannerisms and dreams had vanished. Teapots, I decided, were connected to storytelling, belonging to the Department of Once Upon a Time.

Like M. John Harrison’s Brexit novel, The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, Hydra is primarily concerned with crises of meaning: how it’s derived, what happens when it breaks down (a single sentence places the novel in 2016 amongst the US election). Anja is hungry for meaning. When she and her husband witness an extraordinary natural phenomenon in holiday, Anja’s need to know why drives a wedge between them. “There’s no answer. This is it. This is all there is,” he throws at her. Like Harrison, Howell plays with our own desire for loose ends tied and all things vested with meaning, and is happy to leave us hanging.

Just like its slippery meanings, Hydra’s prose shifts through many modes. It has some of the transgressive delight of Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire, some of the grotesquery of Robbie Arnott, and it’s shivery mystery reminds of Tim Winton’s early foray into horror, In The Winter Dark. Its evocation of the windswept moonah forests of the Mornington Peninsula make for a wild, spooky escape.

Gay rating: 2/5 for a queer minor character.