Possessed of a murderous streak, Hester has always known that one day she’ll kill her father. When her 40th birthday is marked by an oncologist’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, she decides to walk away from her outwardly successful life and take a road trip to California: final destination Dad’s house, to deliver a bullet to his treacherous brain. In the fabulous debut, Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, we join Hester on a chaotic journey, accompanied by hitchhiking eco-activist, John, a man intent on saving the world while Hester turns a blind and indifferent eye.
A unique plot mashup, Bad Nature explores the legacy of familial trauma alongside the current environmental crisis, and wraps it up in a cinematic road trip that begins the day Hester receives her prognosis. Quitting her lucrative career as a corporate lawyer, she abandons her Manhattan condo, setting off in her E-Type Jag with a gun and her mother’s ashes in the glovebox.
In time, Hester will share the reasons behind her vengeful mission, but in the opening hours of her trip, her ruminations revolve around her mother’s unfulfilled life and her father’s career as a mediocre artist (she occasionally checks his website to confirm he’s alive and ‘therefore still killable’). Feeling that her body has betrayed her, Hester also considers the malignant tumour in her breast, an uninvited guest that she names Beryl.
Her next guest is of the invited sort, John, ‘crustpunk’, and eco-warrior, who she picks up as he hitchhikes west, on a mission to photograph sites contaminated or polluted by corporations. He thinks Hester’s cynical and apathetic, she thinks he’s a dumb hippie, but calculating that Beryl will give her time, decides to visit some toxic sites with him en route to California. She just won’t mention the fact that she spent most of her career defending companies like the ones John is pursuing.
A bold, bizarre story for our times, Bad Nature charts one woman’s response to her own impending death juxtaposed with the potential demise of the whole planet. Hester has chosen revenge, John has chosen resistance. With his acts of reportage and ecotage, John’s conscience is clear, but even as Hester is drawn into his world, she can’t resist acerbic observations: he subsists on meagre portions of nuts and fruit and is practically ‘like ecorexic’, he indulges in earnest hand-wringing over his ‘consumerist sins’ and looks like a Russian serf. Maybe so, but at least he isn’t a narcissistic materialist with unfeasibly glossy hair.
Cruising through the states towards California and drawing ever nearer to Hester’s endgame, the mismatched pair encounter mishap and adventure, often shot through with wickedly dark humour. Underneath it all lies Hester’s pain, revealed to us in snapshots of her past.
A great debut, funny, timely and unpredictable. Destined for the Summer Recommends reading lists.
Bad Nature by Ariel Courage is published by Chatto and Windus, 304 pages.
