Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts-The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom-and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people.
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