Privileged Eye

The name does the work. Oblivia: oblivious, incurious about her own position. Appropria: she appropriates — the labour, the knowledge, the grief of communities she passes through. Together they describe a figure most readers will recognise from journalism, from NGO dispatches, from the kind of literary nonfiction that wins prizes for bearing witness to places it arrived at last week.

The collection is not a satire of bad intentions. Oblivia means well. That is the point. Meaning well, arriving with credentials, having the right contacts and the correct politics — none of it changes what the eye takes and what it leaves. Each story follows her into a site of environmental harm: a dam negotiation, a corporate listening session, a rewilding scheme, a grief walk. In each, she solves the case. In each, the solution is hers, which means it is not quite right, which means it costs something she will not be the one to pay.

Alexandrei Harris, environmental researcher writing for The Times, files alongside her. His pieces run in the paper. They are believed. He is the formal record of what she saw, which means he is the formal record of what she missed. The two of them together constitute a system of knowing that feels thorough precisely because it is closed.

Below that system: the communities who have been there longer. Each story is told twice — once through Oblivia's investigation, once through the angle she couldn't hold. The collection asks what gets built on the gap between them.