And indeed they must, because Sokaluk, although present throughout the book, is always at one remove, both from the reader and from Hooper, who was unable to interview him.
The characters offer myriad interpretations of Sokaluk’s motivations which Hooper does not adjudicate there remains space for the reader to decide what they believe to be true about the fires and about the arsonist. While Hooper does allow her multiple characters many digressions, The Arsonist achieves its clarity through strict linear chronology.
This is because they derive their narrative coherence from atomised sources that often conflict with each other. If not handled carefully, reconstruction narratives can turn stories into unsolvable puzzles. Hooper dug through court transcripts, documents and interviews to recreate the Black Saturday bushfires and inquest and to present a context for her account of Brendan Sokaluk’s crimes. But the central character of The Arsonist is Brendan Sokaluk, a shadowy shapeshifter, and the book an inquiry into why he set his hometown ablaze. Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts-The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom-and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog.
The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road.
At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people.
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