A Wild Coming-Of-Age: "The Inland Sea" by Madeleine Watts
- Caroline Hamar
- Jan 26
- 2 min read
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts presents a haunting meditation on climate anxiety, personal crisis, and Australia's colonial history. Released in 2020 by Pushkin Press, this debut novel garnered significant acclaim, earning Watts recognition as a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist and securing a place on the Stella Prize longlist.
Watts, an Australian writer based in New York, weaves together historical narrative with contemporary crisis through the story of her unnamed narrator, a young woman working as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. The protagonist's life mirrors the environmental devastation she witnesses daily – both spiraling into chaos as she navigates toxic relationships, excessive drinking, and an increasing disconnection from herself.
The novel draws its title from the nineteenth-century quest of explorer John Oxley to find an inland sea in Australia's center – a journey that parallels our narrator's own search for meaning and purpose. This historical thread intertwines seamlessly with the contemporary narrative, creating a rich tapestry of past and present ecological and personal devastation.
Watts's prose is precise and evocative, capturing the suffocating heat of Sydney summers and the mounting tension of emergency calls with equal precision. The stream-of-consciousness style effectively conveys the protagonist's increasingly fractured state of mind, while maintaining a compelling narrative flow that pulls readers through the story's darkest moments.
What makes this story so compelling is how the protagonist is an anti-hero, she is self-destructive and the book does not follow the familiar arch and redemption of mainstream ‘finding yourself’ or ‘coming-of-age’ tales. This is raw. I feel that Watts must have poured much of herself and her own experiences into this book to give it such a deeply personal immersion. That is what makes stories worth telling - the intricate and particular moments of our lives turned into a global understanding of being human.
The Inland Sea masterfully explores themes of climate crisis, female agency, and generational trauma. Through the protagonist's work at the emergency call center, Watts illuminates the perpetual state of crisis that defines our contemporary existence – both personal and planetary. The book doesn't offer easy solutions but instead presents a profound examination of how we live with the knowledge of impending catastrophe.
What sets this novel apart is its ability to make the global personal. The protagonist's self-destructive behavior becomes a mirror for society's larger pattern of environmental destruction. Watts achieves this parallel without heavy-handed metaphor, allowing the connections to emerge organically through careful observation and powerful imagery.
The Inland Sea is an unflinching portrait of contemporary anxiety that resonates with particular power in our current climate crisis. It's a book that haunts the reader long after the final page, forcing us to confront uncomfortable truths about our relationship with the natural world and ourselves.
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