The Thinning features Fin, a young woman tasked by a group of fellow outcasts to undertake a hazardous journey through the bushland of the Warrumbungle National Park (Gamilaraay Country). She must reach a particular mountain peak in time for a solar eclipse and to send a vital signal to her mother, who is instrumental to the upcoming uprising. To succeed, Fin has to dodge the dangerous authorities searching for outcasts like herself, as well as avoid anyone along the way who could turn her in, derailing not just her mission but her life.
Fin is accompanied by a young ‘Incomplete’, Terry. She and Terry get to know, like and respect each other. He is wanted by the authorities who wish to study and, it is suspected, exploit the Incompletes – the newly evolved humans with some strange gifts and limitations. The first generation of Incompletes is nearing maturity and, as Fin’s friend from her former life, Hild, explains to her, the authorities “need our eggs”; as the human race is in danger of dying out – the enforced harvesting of eggs and the subsequent fertilisation of young women is on the horizon.
In between recounting details of the expedition, Fin recalls episodes of the life she led before she became an outcast. Intertwining two time periods can be hard to pull off without irritating flashbacks, loss of continuity and a consequent decline in momentum. But in Inga Simpson’s immensely skilled hands, the present story never loses pace while the reader learns about Fin’s reformist parents, friends and teacher, and of the polluted and misgoverned into which world she was born. A world in which many creatures have become extinct – and extinction threatens others as well as humanity itself.
Because Fin’s father was an astrologer and her mother an astrophotographer, the night sky was a fundamental part of her childhood:
Venus is up, diamond white, the only female planet. I can make out the bright smudges of the Magellanic Clouds, the dwarf galaxies named for the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer, even though the Persian astronomer, Sufi, wrote about them centuries earlier. And they were named and storied for tens of thousands of years before that, by First Peoples.
Simpson is not just an acclaimed novelist, but also highly regarded for her nature writing. Fans of either genre will be delighted by The Thinning, which features not only vivid descriptions of the night sky, but also of some of the birds she encounters on her journey.
We have been called the digital society for obvious reasons. We have been called the consumer society much to our shame. I don’t recall us, though, being referred to as the labelling society – but we seem to have a label for everything. Even individual pieces of fruit get their own little sticker attached to them at the supermarket. And so it is with books, with covers proudly proclaiming, ‘spine-tingling thriller’, ‘truly exciting’, ‘eye-opening’, ‘supremely tense’. Add ‘sensitive’, ‘apocalyptic’, ‘insightful’ and ‘beautifully written’ and you have a set of labels to help describe The Thinning. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Read: Book review: Three Days in June, Anne Tyler
But no label can fully do justice to the essence, the quality, the depth of a tale that’s as subtle yet momentous as The Thinning. It is one of those rare novels you may wish to read again.
The Thinning, Inga Simpson
Publisher: Hachette
ISBN: 9780733643514
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320pp
Publication: 30 October 2024
RRP: $32.99
