The Coral Bones by E J Swift

I would like to thank Laura from Unsung Stories for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Jo Fletcher Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £9.99 paperback £5.49 Kindle eBook

Three women: divided by time, connected by the ocean.

Marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is racing against time to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, but struggles to fight for a future in a world where so much has already been lost.

Seventeen-year-old Judith Holliman escapes the monotony of Sydney Town during the nineteenth century, when her naval captain father lets her accompany him on a voyage, unaware of the wonders and dangers she will soon encounter.

 Telma Velasco is hunting for a miracle in a world ravaged by global heating: a leafy seadragon, long believed extinct, has been sighted. But as Telma investigates, she finds hope in unexpected places.

Past, present and future collide in this powerful elegy to a disappearing world – and vision of a more hopeful future.

Our relationship with nature is both ancient and in a constant state of flux. We have been at times very much subject to its power and then tried to use it as a servant and now find ourselves at a crossroads where it could even destroy us. Can we see how we got there and ultimately can we get ourselves out of the mess we have got ourselves in? In EJ Swift’s magnificent, ambitious, and poetical new science fiction novel The Coral Bones we get a story exploring this relationship focused on three women all living centuries apart from one another yet linked by their love of nature and their fears of the future.

In near modern day Australia marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is shocked when on the island near the Great Barrier reef some tourists find a dead body daubed in white paint and with a message painted on a rubber dinghy warning of the environmental collapse impacting the seas. Hana is already disturbed by the ever-growing number of warning signs that the point of no return is nearing and her life is feeling lost so she investigates who the dead man really was.

In early Nineteenth Century Australia Judith Holliman, the daughter of a semi famous wealthy English explorer awaits the return of her father to both tell him bad news about his marriage and to try and get on his next adventure to explore the coastal waters of Australia. Judith has been studying nature since she was small and is well aware of the various developments in science and the latest news about a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Judith wants to see the world for herself but is about to find it stranger, more beautiful; and more dangerous than she ever imagined.

In the far future humanity lives in a devastated world and is the process of slowly rebuilding the Earth and its ecosystems. Telma works at finding animals either stolen into captivity or that may have escaped nature’s various collapses. She is sent on a mission to find an elusive sea-dragon. Haunted by loss and running away from her family on her mission she will find something stranger and just possibly more hopeful.

I absolutely loved this story and the way Swift delivered it. This is not the tale of magic bullets that handwave solutions environmental collapse but more a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s complicated relationship with nature. Each of the three linked stories explore this in different ways but all contain some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read in a long time that explain why as one-character describes in this book that biology is art.

With Judith we get a tale of a young woman brimming with enthusiasm. Her tale is a set of diary entries explaining how she persuades/harangues her father to achieve her dream of getting on a nature expedition to what back then is the unknown coast of Australia and the mysterious Reefs that Captain Cook had recently found. Here Swift adopts a historical drama style and that befits the initial sense that Judith has that this is all an adventure. Here with the dawning of naturalism we get both how early studies of biology were prized (and seen as weird by many) and capture Judith’s love of seeing things no one has seen before and then trying to work them out. The joy of science and nature really comes across. However, the tale has a growing darker edge as the ship sails into troubled waters. We see nature can indeed be deadly; humanity is always fearful and often just wants to take, take, and take. Here Swift sows the seeds to indicate that  just around the corner from this moment in time is colonialism and industrialisation on a scale that no one in this tale appreciates or could even imagine and the wonders they see now will shortly all fade away.

With Hana’s tale which often feels the crux of the whole story. Hana tells the story to he ex-lover of the discovery of the body and how she is swept into the mystery of who this dead man she brought to shore was. There is a touch of the thriller to this tale as there are unanswered questions as to how he was found in such a strange state, but we also have a tale of a woman absolutely rocked by what she sees as the ending of the world she knows. Hana stands on the precipice just like the world does and it has hugely impacted her life and relationships. Swift captures Hana’s moments of happiness and despair in the form of this confessional letter and yet also we get to see Hana’s life-long love affair with the sea. We capture how she first saw life under the ocean; the joy of discovery and her experiments to make coral survive an ever deadlier sea. But that sense of looming loss is the battle she has to try and find a way to navigate. All throughout the story we are kept guessing as to how this will really end.

With Tema’s tale we have the most science fictional part of the novel set a few hundred years in a world after the collapse of the environment. Continents are cut off from each other. The seas are dead; temperatures outside can roast your organs and so humanity lives in precise, measured, and controlled cities. Resource management is tightly controlled, and we get snippets of future history explained. How much has been lost and now efforts to repair it are underway. One poignant idea is how to bring temperatures under control we had to make the sky lose its blue colour and what that meant for the generations who saw it. Telma herself a middle-aged woman who has lost one of her daughters who was fighting a massive forest fire is now nearly all about her job. Focused on retrieving nature and building up genetic stock to help seed the earth. Nothing else seems to matter to her despite her other daughter’s entreaties. Indeed, the early scenes suggest we are in for a cyberpunk style tale of a woman in an amazing combat suit seeking endangered animals from dangerous humans. It would have been easy to make this story the grimmest and the darkest of the three tales but while Swift makes it clear humanity causes immense damage very soon this is a tale where potential for hope is found. There is no fix everything solution, but Telma’s tale becomes a quest into the unknown and ultimately is someone re-discovering a love of the world that Judith and Hana would also recognise, and we also will subtly explain the way these three women’s lives are connected in an intelligent and powerful way. A reminder that this is our mess, and we are the only species capable of cleaning it up too but it is a long term battle to come.

This is one of the best science fiction novels using climate change as a theme I’ve read in recent years. It explores our changing and complicated relationship with nature; the emotional impact it has on our lives and where our future role with it is heading. It is combined with also some of the beautiful, poetical, and powerful writing I have seen to describe the wonder of nature, science and being human. It’s a standout novel and I strongly recommend you pick this up