Rhett Davis is a writer whose work has appeared in publications like The Big Issue and Meanjin. He won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. His debut novel is Hovering
As Hovering begins Alice Wren is mid-flight. At the insistence of an urgent email Alice has fled Berlin, returning to Australia and her hometown of Fraser.
After seventeen years the city is not what she remembers. The taxis are blue, her sister resents her disappearance and the nephew she has never met is now almost a man.
As for the city of Fraser; it changes daily, shifting, dislocating and rearranging itself in unfathomable ways.
Lydia and George don’t know what to make of Alice’s sudden return. Lydia retreats into an online sanctuary, craving the predictability and control of her digital garden. George maintains a kind of stoic silence, communicating online through text. It is the only way he can quiet the voices that flow unbidden through his head.
Hovering is a fascinating, conceptually dense novel that seeks to engage with our digitally saturated world by exploring its extremes. The action radiates out from the novel's central family of Alice, Lydia and George..
Alice initially fled Fraser because she felt it was a cultural backwater. Her quest led her to a state of permanent dislocation as she struggles to find anywhere that is truly home. In Alice we confront cultural cringe in all its permutations…
Lydia and George lead diverging online lives. Lydia is the fear of the iPad generation all grown up. Despite her son reaching out to her to bridge the gap, she would rather stay logged on and seek comfort in the algorithms she understands better than people.
George navigates these ructions with seeming equanimity. He lives comfortably on and offline. At least as comfortably as anyone might trying to move forward in a constantly changing world.
Hovering concerns itself with the ways and means of our daily communication. Davis explores how the flow of communication can facilitate or interrupt life.
In the ever changing geography of Fraser it is impossible to know if your commute to work will remain the same, or even if you’ll return to your address and find your house or a skyscraper. This is, as you might imagine, off putting to the residents and yet for the generation growing up knowing no other way they are comfortable, even happy with the uncertainty. It is near impossible to enjoy the privileges of property status when anyone could find themselves in a mansion or a hovel.
Within the text Davis explores the nuances of our everyday communication. From newspapers and emails, to an entire section written in metadata we are afforded the opportunity to explore what it means to separate the signal from the noise.
All this finds its zenith in George. Afflicted with bouts of crippling noise, George must shut down communication lest he be drowned in the noise. It seems that George is filtering an impossible amount of transmission but can he sift through to make some sort of meaning?
The unrest in Fraser builds with the revelation of Alice’s secret. Physical and digital space become blurred and the how and why of our way of life becomes a very important question to those who want to hunt down Alice and see her answer for her actions.
I feel like I’ve been a little opaque in this review and that’s partly because there are secrets to keep and in part because in challenging form and style Hovering is a novel you have to experience not explain.
Defying genre and challenging convention, I found Hovering an exciting read. Where others look back to understand our moment, Rhett Davis has looked forward, inward and beyond to craft a narrative space all its own.
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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