The raven's song by Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble

The Raven's song is a complex and richly rewarding read. It is the remarkable result of the collaboration of two Australian authors at the height of their powers. The highly unusual idea of a joint effort to produce a novel by two brilliant Middle school writers could only come out of unprecedented times such as the period of Covid lockdowns. This novel speaks of worldwide virus contagion stemming from the ruined environment, of extraordinary attempts to save children and save Earth.

Bren MacDibble is a well-known eco-lit writer whose work often depicts a futuristic dystopian world. Her novels How to bee (2017), The dog runner (2019) and Across the risen sea (2020) have won multiple awards. Zana Fraillon’s award-winning The bone sparrow and The lost soul atlas also interrogate hefty topics of today.

The Raven’s Song invites close reading because of subtleties, nuances - breadcrumbs that are knitted in and through a plot that entangles three periods of history together. The alternating chapters dip in and out of the existences of the main protagonists who somehow are linked over time to the same location. The characters are fully rounded. Twelve -year-old Phoenix’s parts are narrated in third person and are set in our near future - around the late 2020s. Shelby’s parts are narrated in first person and her life is set one hundred years further into the future. The third strand of the story (powerfully linked) is set in the distant past - the pre-Christian era perhaps where villagers believed that sacrifice of a young girl (by drowning her in the bog) would bring rain.

The Raven’s Song has the bog as its central location. The bog is the recipient of lives and the preserver of life and memories and continuity. It is the shroud that hides and reveals. Artefacts and symbolism play an important role in the mystique of this book. The powerful and constant presence and visitations of ravens signifies something portentous? But what? Are they really the souls of the dead?

In The Raven’s Song we have the spooky, speculative freezing of pandemic infected children in the hope that they may be resurrected in the future. McDibble and Fraillon convey an urgent and powerful sense of big brother and of the wholesale failure of industrialization of our world.

Beautifully written and not for the faint hearted, The Raven’s Song is a powerful warning about the destruction of the environment in our current times. In an echo of D.H. Lawrence, MacDibble and Fraillon immerse the reader fully into atmospheric and sensory nature. Teacher's notes are available.

Themes: Pandemics, Dystopian future worlds, Cryogenics, Ethics, Environment.

Wendy Jeffrey