Book Club Encore - Claire G Coleman's Enclave

Final Draft - Great Conversations

This week's episode is an encore performance of the book club originally from June 2022

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar writer, from Western Australia, now based in Naarm. Claire’s debut novel is the award winning Terra Nullius as well as the author of The Old Lie and the acclaimed non-fiction book, Lies Damned Lies. Calire’s third novel, the one I want to talk about today is Enclave.

In the community of Safetown residents live a comfortable life, secure in the knowledge they are protected by the wall. Within that concrete edifice security patrol their streets and drones surveil the airway to ensure even the smallest transgression is met with swift consequences.

Christine has spent her entire life basking in the comfort her fathers wealth and Safetown’s security provide the daughter of an influential family. Sure her father is a distant figure, her mother a high functioning alcoholic, but they’ve just bought her an apartment and extended her a line of seeming unlimited credit.

Safetown was built to protect families like Christine and she should be happy with this safety. Except her best friend Jack is missing and Christine has begun to notice her servants, people who don’t look quite like her…

I think the potency of Enclave will hit readers in different ways.

On a first pass, Enclave seems to have taken the worst of the days headlines: Trump’s wall, fake islands in the South China Sea, almost sentient algorithms watching our online behaviors. Enclave has taken these ideas and extended them to their horrific conclusion. This can seem like a grossly distended version of reality and may strike some as Escher-like, while to others it’s a kind of dystopian porn.

Coleman sets us up in Safetown, allowing us to walk alongside Christine, but it is not with the sort of familiarity or sympathy we might expect from an anointed heroine/protagonist.

At this point it would be easy to see Enclave as commentary on the wrong turn society took too-long ago and Christine as an exemplar of our own generation coming to the realisation we are on the wrong side of history.

But this is Claire G Coleman and just as the reader starts to feel safe that they know where Christine’s story is heading she pulls back the proverbial curtain.

Fans of Claire’s first novel Terra Nullius will know her ability to stage an about face that changes everything you thought you know about the story.

Enclave is a dark tale of excess and the absolutely destructive path of privilege. It exposes racism by showing the absolute mundanity of the everyday actions that reinforce power. There were times as I read that I thought the book was moving too slow, not showing me anything I needed to see. But that was Claire lulling a reader like me, someone who’s lived close enough to privilege to not see it, into believing that this world could exist.

The horror she paints of a segregated society and rampant excess doesn’t look terribly different to a real housewives episode and therein lies the power.

Enclave is an absolute recommendation from me but beware. It’s a story that has your expectations in its sights and knows that we don’t change anything by maintaining the status quo…

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Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

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