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A review by shirley098
The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
An emotional read, detailing the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, which killed 173 people and destroyed 2,000 homes. Scope went from recounts by survivors and first responders of the horrific damage and speed in which the flames spread, to the ensuing police investigation and eventual arson trial. While the book was unable to give concrete answers and motivations, it still provided some interesting insight into Brendan Sokaluk, the main suspect, and how difficult it is to navigate life without when on the spectrum and without a proper diagnosis.
Passages that stuck with me:
When embers started drifting in, most of the helpers decided to leave. Then it was just the Jacobs and 21-year-old Nathan Charles, a part-time scaffolder, who felt it was right to stay. They fought the fire that soon arrived for as long as possible before seeking shelter in a homemade bunker under their house. Around 6.30pm, Charles phoned his father, a truck driver just returning to the Valley from an interstate job, who thought Charles sounded like he was saying goodbye. The call dropped out. The father dialled 000, waited on hold for an eternity, then drove to the Hazelwood North firestation and begged the CFA members on duty to help his son. They told him to ring a central number. He felt he would collapse and die himself right there. He rang his partner and said, 'I think I'm about to bury my son.' A text message soon arrived: Dad im dead I love u
And then the phone calls went unanswered. In the middle of the night, David's daughter avoided the police barricade by driving through the plantation's service tracks. She veered up her grandparents' driveway and assumed, in the dark, she'd taken a wrong turn. The house was missing, turned to rubble.
Further east, on Old Callignee Road, were another father and son. Alfred and Scott Frendo, fifty-eight and twenty-seven years old, gave up on the family home they had been trying to defend and fled in their cars. Their two vehicles were later found sitting on burnt steel rims, moored in ash, one and a half kilometres from their house, which remained undamaged.
A woman whose brother died in the fire had lost contact with people because she didn't want to be asked, or have to answer, how she was.
Another woman worried that she would forget her brother's voice and mannerisms.
A man who'd been on the phone to his son-in-law in the moments before the latter's car caught alight asked himself constantly whether he could have done something to change what happened.
A woman would hear her two-year old granddaughter calling out to her dead son, 'Uncle, where are you? Come and play with me.' The child didn't understand why the people around her were weeping, but she would wake in the night calling the young man's name.
A man who'd stood in a local fire station begging firefighters to send help to the house where his son was trapped would hear a song on the radio that his son had once listened to and be brought instantly undone."
The fire kept spreading in this other dimension, burning through memories, and the layers of identity. Aerial photographs had shown a landscape of black. The survivors found themselves still living inside it, daily tasting the ash.
Break things down to their simplest form and then go on. Try to go on. Each day. Start again and go on. For despite this new, full, life, Shirley longs to go home. At night she dreams she is moving through the rooms of her old house and when she wakes it is lost once again.
Passages that stuck with me:
When embers started drifting in, most of the helpers decided to leave. Then it was just the Jacobs and 21-year-old Nathan Charles, a part-time scaffolder, who felt it was right to stay. They fought the fire that soon arrived for as long as possible before seeking shelter in a homemade bunker under their house. Around 6.30pm, Charles phoned his father, a truck driver just returning to the Valley from an interstate job, who thought Charles sounded like he was saying goodbye. The call dropped out. The father dialled 000, waited on hold for an eternity, then drove to the Hazelwood North firestation and begged the CFA members on duty to help his son. They told him to ring a central number. He felt he would collapse and die himself right there. He rang his partner and said, 'I think I'm about to bury my son.' A text message soon arrived: Dad im dead I love u
And then the phone calls went unanswered. In the middle of the night, David's daughter avoided the police barricade by driving through the plantation's service tracks. She veered up her grandparents' driveway and assumed, in the dark, she'd taken a wrong turn. The house was missing, turned to rubble.
Further east, on Old Callignee Road, were another father and son. Alfred and Scott Frendo, fifty-eight and twenty-seven years old, gave up on the family home they had been trying to defend and fled in their cars. Their two vehicles were later found sitting on burnt steel rims, moored in ash, one and a half kilometres from their house, which remained undamaged.
A woman whose brother died in the fire had lost contact with people because she didn't want to be asked, or have to answer, how she was.
Another woman worried that she would forget her brother's voice and mannerisms.
A man who'd been on the phone to his son-in-law in the moments before the latter's car caught alight asked himself constantly whether he could have done something to change what happened.
A woman would hear her two-year old granddaughter calling out to her dead son, 'Uncle, where are you? Come and play with me.' The child didn't understand why the people around her were weeping, but she would wake in the night calling the young man's name.
A man who'd stood in a local fire station begging firefighters to send help to the house where his son was trapped would hear a song on the radio that his son had once listened to and be brought instantly undone."
The fire kept spreading in this other dimension, burning through memories, and the layers of identity. Aerial photographs had shown a landscape of black. The survivors found themselves still living inside it, daily tasting the ash.
Break things down to their simplest form and then go on. Try to go on. Each day. Start again and go on. For despite this new, full, life, Shirley longs to go home. At night she dreams she is moving through the rooms of her old house and when she wakes it is lost once again.