Kate Mildenhall's Fast-Paced Thriller The Hiding Place Skewers Middle-Class Pretensions

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Eight old friends and a gaggle of kids. A weekend away in the group's recently purchased rural retreat. Simmering tensions, old and new. And the stage is set for Kate Mildenhall 's new literary thriller, The Hiding Place.

Review: The Hiding Place – Kate Mildenhall (Simon & Schuster)

The Hiding Place is Mildenhall's first foray into the genre, after her earlier works of historical and science fiction, but she is clearly at home. Many Australian thrillers draw on the tradition of the Australian Gothic, in which the land symbolises the colonial fear of the Other. Mildenhall inverts this expectation. In her novel, the people are the threat – to the environment and to each other.

The Hiding Place follows a group of friends who jointly purchase an abandoned mining town called Willow Creek, with the ambition of transforming it into their own private Eden, a place to escape the urban rat race. But from their leader Lou's first introduction of the idea, we can see the falsity, the performativity, of their motivations. Lou shifts her strategies of persuasion, appealing to each friend's personal values.

“It's a place to protect,” she tells one.“We'll be caretakers, stewards.” She tells another that it is“somewhere for the family as they grow together, a legacy”.

Each argument is carefully designed to help Lou realise her ideal of family values. She desires a place to nourish her children with organic food and an organic lifestyle, untainted by screens and the demands of modern life. But the friends bring the poison of modern life with them to Willow Creek. They attempt to tame the buildings and the environment according to their own ideas of what is right and good. Even the willow trees for which the town is named are earmarked for destruction.

Their Acknowledgement of Country, written on a sign carefully placed at the front fence, proclaims:“This is Aboriginal land” and“Sovereignty was never ceded”. But the group has no intention of giving up any portion of the land. This is“private property”, its boundaries defined by fences. Trespassers are seen as a threat.

“But, like, what's the point of having the sign here?” one child asks.“If we're not actually going to give the land back?”

Good people

The question hangs over the disputes that arise over the fence line, over a family camping at the edge of the property, over the threat of hunters crossing the land in pursuit of deer.

One member of the group, Flick, baulks at the idea of being a“landlord”, with its implications of capitalist greed, but the friends rationalise their property purchase. They tell themselves that this is different, that it is for their“lifestyle”, that it is“an investment in family and [...] friends”, a realisation of the“good life, because they were good people and that's what they deserved”.

The unspoken point is that those who cannot make such a purchase are undeserving, at least according to the value system by which the group lives. This includes the locals, who had wanted to purchase the land but found it beyond their financial means.

The group's finances are also stretched to the limit, even under the shared contract. Josie is secretly using the property for a controversial research project, which she must complete to keep the funds she needs for Willow Creek. Lou has dipped into her wife Marnie's political campaign money to fund their share of the purchase. Marnie's brother drops out of the contract at the last minute, unable to raise his share, leaving the others stretched even further.

The friends imagine they are“spinning shit into gold”, but in reality they are digging themselves further into the shit, even before the crimes that take place over the weekend.

A sense of community

The group's sense of community extends only so far. That some of them are willing to commit a crime to protect these ideals is the point on which the novel turns, but their hollow ethics of stewardship and contribution are seen everywhere.

At no stage do they reach out to members of the local community, or visit the local shop to support the area's small economy. With the exception of one lamb, slaughtered in service of Phil's ideal of masculine contribution, the friends bring all that they need with them from the city – indeed, more than they need.

They declare their“rules” – of“respect”,“integrity” and“kindness” – but fail to uphold them. Indeed, there is no awareness of what a shifted fence line might mean for their farmer neighbour. Nor do they have tolerance for the family camping on the riverbank, given short notice to leave the property. The echo of the colonialist project in the eviction of people with, it seems, First Nations heritage is lost on Lou and her friends.

Their ethics extend only so far as the hollow promises of the novel's examples of green enterprises, Entheon and GreenDreem, both shown to be exploitative and mercenary. They are merely“playing happy campers”, with no authenticity or integrity, determined only to uphold their“Willow Creek dream”.

The group's hidden truths are uncovered by the novel's end, despite each member's efforts to the contrary. In each case, what is feared is not so much the truth itself as the exposure and associated shame – that is to say, it is not so much the unethical act itself which is upsetting, but the fact that others will know about it, and thus know that, ultimately, they are not“good people”.

Protecting children

One of the epigraphs to The Hiding Place is by children's author Maurice Sendak:

The adults in The Hiding Place claim they want to protect childhood innocence, but they do very little to protect their children. They leave them in the care of the unwilling teenager Stella, while they purport to work on the property, but in fact spend more time drinking and arguing. The children are dismissed or forgotten, even when the group are reminded of the children's vulnerability via the story of a young girl who went missing on the property years earlier.

“A good piece of art elicits a response from its audience,” Stella, an aspiring playwright, writes in her notebook. But what effect does a“good life” have?

In The Hiding Place, Mildenhall exposes the naivety of her adult characters, all of whom are concerned to manage the responses to the good life they are busily creating, as if it were a work of art.

Yet none of them are good. All of their lofty declarations are shown to be false, merely theatrical, as Mildenhall's cinematic narrative powers to its close. Ultimately, it is Stella's perception of these poor lives as good art which brings all the lies and manipulations to a head. Every moment in this narrative leads to its thunderous conclusion.

The Hiding Place is fast-paced and shocking; it pierces to the heart of the modern middle-class Australian dream. It is one of the best books I have read in some time.

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