The Airways opens with a sudden act of shocking violence when a character (one whom readers will recognise in time) is attacked only ‘two hundred steps from home’. During this apparently random assault, they experience a beautifully rendered awareness of the ‘delicate machinery’ of their body. This accompanies awe at the ‘extravagance’ of their own existence, an existence that is over in ‘the space of a breath’. This startling chapter, ‘The body’, is written in the first-person singular, and fragmented sentences jolt across the page in response to the brutality. What follows is a ghost story unusually grounded in the corporeal experience of life and wonder at the human body.

The Airways is made up of three interconnected narratives. Two of them are written in the third-person and follow Adam, a socially awkward young man with a penchant for voyeurism and self-pity. The first of these begins before the attack and is set mostly in the Sydney share-house where self-described ‘good guy’ Adam lives with, and watches, his more progressive housemates: Kate, Marita, and Yun. Adam feels drawn to the non-binary Yun, a student studying virology and microbiology, to the point where he imagines ‘clim[bing] inside them, and exchang[ing] himself’.

Jennifer Mills (photograph via Pan Macmillan)

The other storyline follows Adam’s life five years later. He is now living in Beijing and working for a charismatic Canadian in a newly built office ‘retrofitted in a post-industrial style to give it a startup vibe’. Mills is deftly satirical about the Canadian, the company, and the broader expat community in Beijing, and Adam’s narrative is absorbing (despite the disorientated lethargy he believes is due to ‘something he picked up on the subway’).

The most engaging narrative, however, is the one that opens the novel. After the catalysing moment of violence, this account follows the consciousness that springs from ‘a swarm of anger, a brief blur of pollinating fury’ as ‘unremembered, unbodied, the I becomes they’. Somehow, ‘they’ have flickered back into existence in an entirely new form. Told mostly in the third-person plural present, this immersive narrative shimmers with energy as they travel through the air and from body to body, evolving with every transition. In contrast with the depictions of Adam’s alienation in Sydney and his torpid, confused movements through Beijing, these sections are vibrant. Here, Mills offers deeply humane perspectives into other lives. These insights, which resemble a supernatural version of the reading experience, move from the impressionistic to the lyrical as the consciousness regains memories and develops an understanding of their new existence and what it might allow them to do – whom it might allow them to seek.

These sections are grounded in physical sensations – clothing labels that irritate the skin, traces of old injuries, hunger, longings, pain. While in the body of a shopkeeper, they ‘open in his toothache like a flower’. Later, they feel a baby’s head ‘like a soap bubble’ in the mother’s cupped palm. At one stage, they take flight and their host’s fluttering speed is reflected thus: ‘inabird isfast’. Birds recur throughout the text, as do references to hunger, fruit, photography, trains, the connections between bodies and cities, and the human impulse to identify patterns. Like the frequently disorientated Adam, readers may find themselves confused as they seek truths in the ambiguities, but this makes the moments of clarity and catharsis more satisfying.

There are many thematic similarities with Mills’s earlier politically engaged, inventive works and the novel is also reminiscent of Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (2018) and Alex Landragin’s Crossings (2019), with shades of Evie Wyld’s furious The Bass Rock (2020). Other things echo as well. Specific words and phrases recur, like a linguistic reverberation, a reminder of the connections at work. However, when Adam is twice pushed aside ‘like a curtain’, or when light is twice described as forming a ‘parallelogram’, the effect can be jarring.

In this haunted puzzle of a novel, Mills interrogates the nature of memory, reality, life, and death. She explores questions of consciousness, identity, and the relationship between the self and the body, and studies the spaces where different, sometimes opposing, things bleed into each other. Mills also unpacks the impact of alienation and dislocation, the morality of observation, and the desire to be truly seen and recognised. It is somewhat ironic, then, that we get to know one of the two main characters primarily through their experiences as a passenger in the bodies of others. Although this does allow Mills to present the character at perhaps their most essential, their consciousness having quite literally separated from their physical body, most of the information we receive about their earlier existence derives from other people’s observations and the motley physical possessions they left behind. A direct interaction late in the novel between the two protagonists is shocking in its clear affirmation of personal boundaries and selfhood, things that had become increasingly blurred.

In this provocative novel, in which Mills explores the liminal spaces where one thing blurs into another, one constant is a sense of wonder at life and the human body. The Airways may orbit the aftermath of brutal death, but this is a novel that also embraces elements of ‘body wonder’, as opposed to the more familiar body horror. In a 2012 blog post on her website, Mills wrote that she loved fiction ‘for its metamorphic power’. The Airways offers a moving, disorientating, and sometimes extraordinary, demonstration of that power.