I have a Facebook friend (well, I did know him - he taught us to free dive) who is very, very noisily against God and religion, and often posts memes that expressly argue that those that believe in Him are idiots that believe in tooth fairies. I can't disagree - though I do find there is some kind of divinity, particularly a divinity in nature. He did agree - after calling me a pagan, which I didn't find much of an insult.

'Nature is the only God', he said. He's a man of the ocean, a tuna cowboy, spear fisherman and one of those guys that go down in those under sea mining chamber thingies. Good danger money if you can do it. In some ways, I feel his love of nature conflicts with the violent way he interacts with nature at times. Yet that seems to be an internal truth in all of us - our violent hearts and passionate love of nature, intertwined.

In 'The Rain Heron', the bird of the title is a kind of mystical god I suppose, seemingly having the power to bring famine, drought and disease just as likely as it is to bring abundance and fertility to the land. With any power capable of bringing fortune and blessings of this kind, however, there is bound to be someone who covets it. Yet nature does not live for us - it lives despite of us, and cannot truly be tamed. Any attempts to do so end in tragedy, even though one might gain something in the short term.

The novel interwines the stories of various characters whose lives become interlinked around the heron. Each section apparently stands on it's own, until we eventually see how the threads of their stories weave together. Each present as a kind of fable or parable, and there is an element of magic realism that give the story an element of intrigue and mysticism. The rain heron - who is responsible for no less than three eyebrow pluckings - is made, literally, of rain. There are other fantastical things to which push the story into the realm of myth.

Ren, for example, lives on the edge of the ocean with her Aunt, who come from a tradition of hunting squid for ink. Rather than killing the squid en masse, raping the ocean for profit, they harvest the ink by cutting their arms and allowing the squid to feed off their blood. Once sedated by this feast, the squid are hauled aboard and 'milked' for their special ink that allows food to taste extraordinary and colours to take on a new brilliance. But this life is not to last. In fact, the lives of all of the characters who come across the rain heron will never be the same again.

Although the story is written by an Australian and at one point he mentions cider gums, it could be set almost anywhere in the world - in fact, I thought at first it was South America. There has been a coup of some description, and there is a sense the world is undergoing some kind of upheavel, not unlike our own.

Arnott's story seems to ask what humans will do when confronted by the greatness of the mythical, and whether or not we can be relied upon not to harm them or whether we'll just use them for our own profit. It seems to suggest that we have a tendency to take - and that when we do so so selfishly, we strip the power from it.

Yet there is also a sense of redemption. Sometimes we can find meaning and purpose in things bigger than us, and seek to protect them. It's also about personal histories, and how they define us.

I'm not sure how I ended up reading two books with nature at their core - and birds, no less (The Last Migration by Charlotte Maconoughy featured Arctic terns) - and with an internal message of hope in human's capacity to care for and protect nature, but I enjoyed them both immensely, despite their flaws. Perhaps it's a kind of a solace, in a world where nature is so relentlessly pursued for profit, that there are other people out there revering it as much as I do.