The Rain Heron is a very unique and unusual book yet written beautifully. It's an odd combination of myth with some touches of what could be our future due to climate change.

For some reason, this reminds me of A Trail of Lightning, with the environmental aspects and magical realism. It's so unique and I love love love the allegory we're being immersed in. I highly recommend this for the characters and the beautiful nature of the book.

Robbie Arnott on Creating a Mythical Creature That Embodies the Beauty and Savagery of Nature
In Conversation with Rob Wolf on the New Books Network Podcast

April 23, 2021

At the end of its life, the phoenix bursts into flames and a younger bird rises from the ashes. The roc is large enough to carry an elephant in its claws. The caladrius absorbs disease, curing the ill. The rain heron can take the form of steam, liquid, or ice and controls the climate around it.

Unlike the first three mythical birds, whose legends are hundreds or thousands of years old, the rain heron is a new entry in the library of imaginary beasts, introduced in the novel bearing its name by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott.

Set in an unnamed country following a military coup, The Rain Heron is a story of survivors searching for peace but finding violence—in both nature and society.

Arnott’s descriptions of nature are inspired by the beauty of his Australian home state of Tasmania, where he has spent long stretches hiking in the bush and fishing in the cold waters. “It always comes through in my writing a lot. There’s lots of descriptions of natural places because that’s generally where I’ve been and what I’m interested in. I tried living in a big city for a while and I just I just couldn’t do it.”

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: One of your key characters, Ren, goes to the mountains to live like a hermit, but a group of soldiers find her. Why has she gone to the mountains, and what do the soldiers want from her?

Robbie Arnott: This novel is set in an unnamed country, a couple of years after a military coup has taken over the government and essentially ravaged the life of everyone within the country. Ren has fled to this mountainside, a place she used to go with a grandmother when she was a child, and she’s seeking to return to this more idyllic, simple way of life due to the things that happened to her during the coup, such as her being separated from her son and undergoing periods of violence.

And so what she’s seeking to do is get away from everything and to escape, not to function in a modern society anymore. And she does achieve that for a while, until a group of soldiers comes to the mountain some years after the coup in search of a mythical creature, the rain heron. And it’s unclear whether or not this mythical creature actually exists or not. But these soldiers are under the impression that if it’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to be on the side of this mountain. And if anyone knows how to find it, it will be this woman who’s been living there as a hermit. And that’s where the main tension in the plot kicks off, as these soldiers try to coerce Ren into helping them find this mythical creature, as she tries to convince them that it doesn’t exist.

RW: Not too far into the book, we find out that this mythical creature is real. Could you describe the rain heron and what inspirations you drew from to invent it?

RA: The rain heron is a mythical creature, somewhat larger than an ordinary heron, similar in shape but not in form because it’s entirely made of water and it’s able to transpose its body into any form of water. It can become icy, misty, vapor; it can become steam or hail or rain. And it can do this at will. And along with that, it’s able to affect the climate around it. So it’s able to create rainstorms and floods and affect all the other moisture in the air.

What I was really trying to do was create a mythical creature that embodies both the beauty and the savagery of nature. I wanted something that is totally captivating, the way many natural environments and phenomena can be, but also is really, really dangerous. And the reason I ended up choosing the heron to have this water-based form is because I realized I was thinking about a storm and the way that a storm is so captivating you can’t look away from it, particularly when there’s black clouds rolling in and you see the lightning falling down. But also, you know instinctively that it’s incredibly dangerous and you need to get away from it. And yet we’re still staring at it. … I just essentially tried to turn a storm into a bird.

RW: As you were speaking, I thought how we experience climate change so often through storms, bigger hurricanes, floods, rising waters. [The rain heron] is kind of a spokesperson for how climate change manifests.

RA: Yeah, absolutely. That’s really present in the book. I tried not to make it this really obvious main theme running through it, because that wasn’t the sort of book I wanted to write. But it was also very present in my thinking and in my descriptions. I don’t think you can write about the natural world these days without being conscious of what’s happening to our own. … We’re so used to thinking of climate changes as a heating, as global warming and things getting hotter and drying out. And yet the reality of it is that it’s just chaos and any form of environmental destruction. So storms and floods are as much a part of that as fires and droughts.

The Rain Heron is a perfect blend of environmental fiction, myth and women’s fiction. Though it took me a while to get into the story, I enjoyed it very much. Slow paced, but the myth around the bird that is thought to be a “cure” for environmental crisis is imaginative and kept my interest throughout. The story and genre is more different from what I normally read, but loved the good palate cleanse this did for me. The writing is eloquent and bought the whole story alive.

Thank you FSG and Netgalley for the arc.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Strous and Giroux for this copy of The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott.

The Rain Heron tells the story of a mythical bird that some think has the power to save a dying world. Some of the characters in The Rain Heron want to allow the bird to exist in its natural environment and some want to capture it and use it to change the ever-changing and unpredictable weather. As readers we get introduced to the myth of the rain heron first and then meet the main characters who spend the rest of the book trying to either capture the mythical bird or take it back where it belongs.

To say that I enjoyed The Rain Heron would be an understatement. This was a beautifully written story that, at times, took my breath away with its description of the world as it slowly falls apart and what humans will do to try and save it. The whole book came to life through the writing and I could picture every scene as if I was watching a movie. Very well-written and a very good read.

A woman struggles to survive alone in the wilderness until she is forced to recount a secret path to a mythical bird with surmounting power.

This book was entirely different from most books I've ever read and it took me some time to get used to the sheer cruelty of some of the characters. The world depicted was a bit bleak at times and I almost felt too sad to return to it. However, it's very well written and definitely deserves to reach more people.

It was a rainy afternoon when I picked up this atmospheric and entertaining book of myth, escape, adventure, and well-honed characters.

The myth is presented upfront, and I was drawn to the rain heron and its magical attributes. Then we are taken to the near future where a tragic climate event has caused a political coup where the world as the characters have known no longer. We learn Ren has escaped into the wilderness and living off the land with limited access to human contact, and Zoe has had a traumatic experience as a child but is now in charge of a military operation to capture the mythical bird at whatever cost.

The storyline goes back and forth in time and information is revealed to the reader, as necessary. This cleverly done as to keep the reader focused on the characters and their actions, though in the back of mind I wanted to know what was the climatic event and more about the military coup.

The seemly disparate narratives makes the plot a little bumpy in places, but the beautiful imagery and magical moments will keep the reader turning the pages.

This was a wonderful bittersweet tale by a talented storyteller that effectively controlled the pacing as we learn the age-old tales of greed, envy and power often come with lessons learned too late.
There are twists and turns in the storyline that are matched by twist and turns in the natural environment to the animal sanctuary.

If you are looking for a suspenseful eco-environmental tale with lyrical mythical elements, this is the book for you.

I have to admit - I am not the reader for this book, but I think some of you might be. It has been described as an eco-fable, and while the writing was beautiful, I struggle with stories written around a moral lesson. To me it feels less real than a space opera.

The rain heron makes multiple appearances but there is also a story in the middle with squid.

*Many thanks to Robbie Arnott, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
One of those book which are both mesmerizing and disturbing. Full of allegory and myth, the novel made an impression on me and I found it to be unputdownable although the world created by Mr Arnott is not invitng or giving comfort. I definitely stepped outside my comfort zone reading this novel, and yet I know it will not be easily forgotten.

This book has many strengths, among them a fascinating story and writing that's a perfect balance of evocative and plain-spoken. But I think its greatest strength is the characters. It's rare that I find a book by a male author who writes female characters so deeply and convincingly. And the women in this book are especially tricky – a flinty, taciturn, lot who prefer independence and isolation over community. The male characters are the opposite, attuned to other people and drawn to help them, although there is one male exception whose demise must be one of the most original in fiction. This switched male/female dynamic could be formulaic, but not in Arnott's hands -his characters are too complex for that. There is one other essential character in the story who exists outside gender – the rain heron itself. I don't know how Arnott does it, but this creature of legend exists seamlessly in this harsh and very real world and brings beauty to it. The only problem I'm having with this book is whether the ending is just a shade too well-wrapped, but the only reason I'm even noticing it is because the rest of the book was so terrific.

A very different book, original, using allegory and myth to describe events in a world run amuck. . In fact, it starts with a myth, or at least what sounds like one, of a supposed mythical heron that can bring rain or drought. Wealth or destruction, in a world where climate change is occuring rapidly. The political situation in this unnamed country is also a factor as a coup is happening and people are fleeing villages for other places where they hope to find safety. There are few characters, but each of them have former lives, lives that are no longer livable.

The book is divided into sections, and despite these crucial events, it is a quiet, but impactful novel. . Very much character oriented, and the two main characters are women from very different backgrounds. This is a novel of survival and the ways in which we need or choose to act to survive. Some of the scenes seem impossible, the allegories are paramount and open to a readers interpretation as to what they are meant to represent.

The writing is gorgeous, the descriptions eloquent and despite the often grim state of affairs, quite lovely. A very strange book about a strange time, but after the last year with Covid and a tense political situation, I found this to be a perfect book.

ARC from Netgalley.

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

These are the first lines of the novel but the prose is so stunning this is truly what grabbed me and compelled me to read on and on and on...“A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain it would not sprout. If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them). Success and happiness were foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to go to bed unhungry. All she had was her hunger and her farm—and her farm, as far as she could tell, wanted her to starve.”

Published in Australia in 2020; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG Originals) on February 9, 2021

A central character in The Rain Heron believes she brought a myth to life and comes to regret her actions. Robbie Arnott creates a myth and brings a novel to life as he tells the story of two women whose lives the myth changes.

The Rain Heron opens with a fable about a heron that brings prosperity to an unlucky farmer until a jealous neighbor kills it and brings misfortune to everyone. The heron is nearly transparent, a bird made of water. Later in the story, we learn that the rain heron (or perhaps a different one) actually exists and that it is capable of changing the climate in its immediate vicinity by breathing steam or frost.

The main story takes place in an unnamed country in troubled times. The country has experienced a coup. The weather is extreme and unpredictable. Jobs have disappeared. Schools are closed and crime is rampant.

When the main story starts, we know only that a woman named Ren is living on her own on a mountain, using a cave for shelter, trapping animals and foraging for mushrooms. She meets weekly with a man named Barlow, who trades goods from the village for her animal skins. Barlow warns her that soldiers have come to the village but we don’t know why. Ren shows no interest in news of the soldiers until she meets one, a female lieutenant named Zoe Harker who wants her help searching for the mythical heron. Her methods to gain Ren’s assistance are cruel but effective. Harker pays a price for disturbing the heron, just as Ren pays a price for resisting Harker.

The novel’s second part tells Harker’s backstory, although most of that story concerns Harker’s mother, who uses her blood to coax squid into releasing their ink, and the foreigner who tries to learn her secret. The squid, like the rain heron, have mythological qualities that become apparent during the ink-releasing ritual.

The third part returns to the present, focusing largely on a medic named Daniel as Harker’s soldiers turn to the next phase of their mission. When Daniel asks Harker why the generals want the rain heron, she responds, “Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.” Harker's jaded view of men may change before the novel ends.

Harker’s story, in fact, is one of a constantly changing life, a life of apparent self-discovery followed by her discovery that she cannot abide the person she has become. Daniel’s story is a struggle to retain the sense of hope and empathy that has sustained his young life in the face of the horrors he has seen.

In the novel’s concluding part, a worker at a wildlife sanctuary tells Harker that he believed in rain herons as a child, because children believe everything that they are told, but later stopped believing in impossible things. After the coup, when things stopped making sense, he found it possible to believe in the impossible again. The worker, Alec, was a terrible soldier who was finally assigned to the sanctuary as a research assistant. Now he’s alone and forgotten, a condition that suits him. It seems a good place for Harker to join him in a brooding reflection on the lessons we might learn from myths. At least until the past catches up with the present, leading to a final dramatic moment that will change Harker’s life again.

Arnott balances a harsh story with soothing prose that carries the plot in the grip of its steady currents. His characters are decent people who live in indecent times, people who might behave indecently without losing their humanity. The novel’s ending combines the myth of the rain heron with the myth of the squid to make something new and wondrous.

If myths teach lessons, one lesson taught by The Rain Heron is that reality does its best to crush mythology, yet we can learn from both. We can learn from our mistakes. We can crawl up from the depths of our despair. And if we can’t change the past, we can at least make amends.

Myths are meant to tell us something about where we came from and who we are. They help us see ourselves with sharper clarity. By blending the motifs of mythology with the dangers that confront inhabitants of the modern world (unstable government, global warming), The Rain Heron reminds us that we can be better than we have been, that we possess the power to transform ourselves and our world, to make the impossible possible.

RECOMMENDED

The Rain Heron is a modern eco-fable set in a country post-coup and after climate change. Though nothing is outright said about climate change there are several references to changes in weather and temperature that have caused people to move.

Ren lives by herself in a cave on a mountain in order to escape the modern world. Her solitary existence is disturbed when a young lieutenant and her troops show up in search of a mythical rain heron. The story is broken into several parts, each of which tells the story from the perspective of a different character. Their lives become intertwined and each is saddled with the weight of doing what they're told vs what is right. This is all in the context of a story which at its heart is about humans trying to control nature.

Highly recommend this one to fans of magical realism and modern fables.

In a post coup d'état landscape, a woman named Ren lives in a cave in the mountains in total isolation. Ren hunts animals and trades their skins with an old farmer in exchange of necessary items. Her peaceful life disrupts when some soldiers come to her cave in search of a mythical bird with the ability to make rain called the Rain Heron.

Somewhere in the south, in a remote village, Zoe, a young girl and her aunt living in a small secretive community that uses human blood to lure squid into nets in order to extract the squid ink, a valuable commodity. But the arrival of an outsider obsessed with learning the ancient art becomes threat to the community’s symbiotic relationship with the nature.

It is a powerful meditation on human greed and violence but also on redemption. The novel delves in the three seemingly disparate narratives which further evoke the sense of human resilience, friendship and humankind’s precarious relationship to nature. I enjoyed the way the author displayed Ren’s and Zoe’s lives entwined and unravelled into a masterful and allegorical display of human condition. Blindness is a recurring theme throughout the story which represents the ignorance and frailty of humans towards the nature. Another stunner by an Australian author, laden with superb storytelling and strikingly vivid landscape, this novel is a must read. Highly recommended.

*𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐫, 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐱 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐑𝐂 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐲 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧.

Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is an important book, but not because it is a good book. It is an important read because it is that rarity of a science-fiction work that comes to us from Down Under. Arnott is an Australian writer, but, even more striking, he comes from Tasmania. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often think of Tasmania as a member of the Northern Hemisphere unless I’m thinking about old Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Because of this, The Rain Heron is, again, a welcome book. We need to have more fiction — and more science fiction — come from far-flung places such as Australia, and it is with open arms that I received this book as a result.

The unfortunate part, though, is that, as a novel and a narrative, I’m a little lukewarm on this cartoonish read. The book is about myths and past personal histories, and how they come to define an individual. The novel — at least, initially — focuses on a female character named Ren (no relation to Stimpy) who lives alone in a mountainous forest as a survivalist. A coup has ravaged her nation — although we don’t get many details about the coup or who is in power, or what may have driven people to live in the bush other than a build-up military presence in the region. Speaking of which, one day, a small unit of military members comes to Ren’s domicile and start asking questions about a mythic creature known as a Rain Heron who can change the weather at will and turn crops stricken by drought into thriving plants in rained-out fields. After much cajoling, Ren agrees to take the military to where this “myth” is situated — but does she even know where it lives or if it exists at all?

As you can tell, this is a story that is rather light on the sci-fi and is perhaps a little more literary. It is a strikingly original tale, and it is quite evident that Arnott is a talented and gifted writer. He works at his best when describing his character’s personal myths. Indeed, the best part of this novel is a flashback to one of the character’s coming-of-age when she and her aunt go off into the ocean to acquire ink from squids that has a ritualistic quality to it. A northerner figures into this story and brings doom and gloom to these characters — which illustrates how crucial it is for people in the northern hemisphere to hear the tales and criticisms from our southern neighbours. However, other parts of the book are less successful. For instance, even though the book is less than 300 pages long, there are long stretches that detail trips by motorized vehicles that add nothing to the narrative and could have been easily left on the cutting room floor. This makes The Rain Heron a little boring and dull from time to time. These sections ultimately feel like padding.

The other major piece of criticism I have for The Rain Heron relates to character motivation. I don’t want to give anything away or spoil anything, but one of the main characters has a change of heart regarding her actions at one point — and, to me, it is never fully explained by the author what caused this character change. You can make inferences if you will, but it seems as though this character’s behaviour changes on a dime, which makes it hard to connect with this novel. As well, the novel is rather predictable. One character disappears from the narrative for a stretch and — this might be a bit of a spoiler, even though I’m going to be skimpy on the details, so quit reading here if you want to come to The Rain Heron cold — are presumed to be dead, but then reappear at the novel’s end. I was able to predict the reappearance. It just seemed that the character was important enough to not have been eliminated fully from the text.

However, I don’t want to give the impression that The Rain Heron is better left being read about than actually read. For one, Arnott is gifted with the powers of descriptive writing, even though I did think he went a little overboard with it. You’ll have pictures unspooling in your mind usually quite clearly as Arnott weaves his unconventional tale. As well, The Rain Heron is certainly unique in that it is original. It is a bit science-fiction-y without being fully science fictional. It is not really a fabulist tale nor is it really slipstream, so Arnott may have invented a new strain or sub-genre of SF here. It is that daring and perhaps a bit different.

Still, The Rain Heron is not perfect. I’ve already outlined the reasons why, and don’t want to flog a dead horse, but, as noted, the narrative could have been tightened up. (I also think the squid hunting part of the book should have been expanded and become the true novel itself as it is the most compelling part of the read). The book is sometimes a bit on the cartoony side, as some of the myth and stuff related to the myth feels a bit juvenile to me. However, no matter what faults you can find with this book, it still should be read. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of books coming from Australia that I’m aware of, so any time a book from there lands on northern shores, it should be investigated. There’s a power imbalance between the hemispheres and both sides of the world have different ways of seeing things. That makes it important to read books from the “deep south” side of the world as a northerner. People down there have important things to say about how the other half lives, and The Rain Heron deftly falls into that category — which makes it worthy of being checked out and investigated. Ultimately, this is a flawed but invigorating (and necessary!) read.

This is the kind of book that wins awards. It's powerful storytelling, it's a slow burn. It touches on humanity and ecological issues.

Robbie Arnott has written characters that grab hold of you and in the end, you won't let them go.

I finished this book two weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I'm going to be the odd one out on this one. While it's beautifully written, it also felt, to me, to strain for metaphor and to make points about the environment and so on. I appreciated the opportunity to read it and recommend to fans of literary fiction.

Stunning, immersive and hugely original, 'The Rain Heron' is a richly imagined allegorical fable for our times. Set in a slightly futuristic world where climate change has impacted severely on the land and its people, Arnott spins three tales of strong women making lives out of the damaged land.
Together these tales culminate in a picture of a world where the environment is subject to greater forces than can be controlled by mere human will. Arnott's crafting of the exquisite rain heron as a fearful power over the climate, either benevolent in bringing gentle rain or cruelly scorching the land, shows it is heedless of what humans want from it, refusing to be controlled by man. His writing is beautiful and lyrical with the sights and sounds of richly imagined landscapes brought to life.

I was really interested in this novel because I had heard that it was a fable, and it is. But the way it was written just didn't lend itself to that fable-esque quality that I was looking for. I think my major issue with this novel was the writing. It wasn't bad, per se; it was just really plain and straightforward. I personally like my novels to be written in a more flowery way, but I've loved some novels that have had simple writing styles. So it wasn't just an issue of simple writing, here. It was more that the writing felt so empty. I didn't feel affected by this story at all because the writing just didn't convey me to the gravity of the characters' emotions. I also didn't particularly like the fact that this novel was split into a bunch of parts. I would've much rather had a more developed story from one character's perspective, or even a third person novel that just followed a bunch of characters without necessarily relegating them to a separate perspective. I can definitely appreciate what Robbie Arnott was trying to do with this novel, but it didn't quite succeed for me in terms of execution.