Under Control

In The Mother Fault, KATE MILDENHALL paints a prescient picture of motherhood in a dystopian Australia. MAX LEWIS writes.

How does it feel to have written a chilling dystopian vision of Australia, only to have it slowly come true?

‘Very, very odd,’ says Kate Mildenhall, author of Skylarking and now The Mother Fault, which presents a not-too-distant Australia ruled by a totalitarian party known only as The Department.

‘Reading things during the first lockdown, about how “We’re all in this together”, I was literally reading words I’d written in my book, that kind of bureaucratic speech that comes out to quell the masses.’

Indeed, The Mother Fault does take place after viruses, numerous terrorist attacks, and environmental disasters slowly allow The Department to track their citizens with microchips, under the guise of keeping people safe. Our protagonist, Mim, finds herself in their crosshairs when her husband goes missing while on a mining assignment in Indonesia. When The Department threatens to take their children away, Mim has no choice but to go on the run with them to find her husband.

The Mother Fault isn’t just an Orwellian fantasy; it’s also a love story. Like Kate’s debut Skylarking, it’s about being torn between different kinds of love. In Skylarking, it was platonic and romantic. In The Mother Fault, it’s maternal and nostalgic.

‘One of the things I was really thinking about when I began this novel was the tension between how I was feeling as a mum with young kids, at the same time as watching things happening in the world where there were, particularly women, going to great lengths to keep their children safe. The idea that sometimes I wanted to chuck my children in the bin because they were being ratbags, and yet I knew that I would, if push came to shove, kill for them, was that tension that I really wanted to explore.’

Throughout the novel, Mim reflects on her life before her kids, and before The Department. It comes back to haunt her in literal ways too; a tense visit to her former family home one final time, and her first love coming out of the blue to lend a hand. Her former occupation as a geologist, which she had to set aside once she had children, is a very deliberate choice.

‘When you become a parent, it can almost feel like your old previous life disappears and isn’t there anymore. That was part of why I was so interested in looking at geology, it’s kind of this overall metaphor in the book. It was Mim being able to recognise that all those layers of herself and her past, she needs to draw on them to make it through this extraordinary situation she finds herself in.’

The fascinating subtext of The Mother Fault doesn’t end there. The aftermath of rapacious land destruction for resources is felt throughout Mim’s journey across outback Australia and eventually Indonesia - from fracking in her former backyard, to a conspiracy of government atrocity at a remote mining station. Mother Earth is bled dry, much in the same way Mim is mentally, and almost physically, depleted in her maternal role of protecting her children - a role she never really asked for. Throughout, Mim constantly feels like she is screwing up, making mistakes that will harm her children. It’s an inner critic that every parent will relate to, wonderfully reflected in the title of The Mother Fault.

‘It wasn’t always called that, but when I first arrived at that title I told my own mother, and she said “Oh, you can’t call it that!” Almost like the idea of putting “mother” and “fault” together was an accusation that she felt readers couldn’t handle. But going further into it, the obvious ideas of it being a fault line and geological, but also that idea that you can be a mother to a fault: Mim tries so hard to live up to this idea of what she thinks she should be as a mother. And then there’s the idea that it is your fault, which is what mothers think all the time when anything goes wrong.’

Like all good dystopian stories, The Mother Fault has an aura of perseverance and hope. Finding love in the darkness might be all we need to make it through the challenges we face now, or will face in the future.

‘That’s the tension in The Mother Fault,’ says Kate. ‘It’s kind of looking at Mim’s self-love, her acceptance of herself as a mother, but also, it’s a love story between Mim and her children. That’s what I really wanted to come through.’ 

The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall is published by Simon & Schuster.