Carpentaria (2006)

An amazing epic novel about isolated communities near Carpentaria Bay on the northern coast of Australia: feuding Aboriginals, vindictive Anglos, and destructive employees of an international mine, as well as the sea, ancestors, birds, storms and the Great Serpent pulsing through the earth.

Alexis Wright is herself an Aboriginal and draws on her own traditions. I don’t know enough about those traditions to do more than note a few observations. The book opens with the Great Serpent moving over and under and through the region south of Carpentaria Bay, shaping it, depositing minerals in its ground and digging out its winding river channels. In a similar manner, Wright swirls together people, events, and words within circles that keep returning to key figures. Events move with the grace and terror of the Great Serpent with individuals guiding or passive in their wake. Mysticism in woven into sheer page-turning adventure. You don’t have to be an Aboriginal to resonant with the human distress, terror, and joy which this book conveys. At another level this is a richly human book, full of characters who think and feel.

Read more on my blog: me, you and books
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/carpentaria-by-alexis-wright/

I really struggled with this book and was so relieved when I finished it.

It's about an Aboriginal community who live in Desperance, north-east Australia, and the Phantom family in particular. That's about as much as I can say about the plot.

My trouble with this book was the plot, actually - there wasn't one. Any action is kept until the last fifth of the book, by which point I'm sure a lot of people would have already given up. If I'm honest, the book just bored me.

That's not to say that it isn't well-written because it is, but it wasn't for me. There's only so much rambling narrative and lack of dialogue that I can take. ( )

“…Alexis Wright is from Northern Australia and the book is set in a place called Carpentaria on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is still largely inhabited by Aboriginal people. So it is a place where ancient myth is still alive and also a lot of contemporary politics. Geographically, it has these huge tidal flows of the wet season and the dry, and the great wild rivers, and the novel works like that too, with a flow of language which is very funny and very eloquent. The characters in her story are larger than life and act out their dramas on this big, big stage.



Alexis Wright is a one-off. I love her voice, which is very colloquial and crackles with humour and with slang, but is also rich and lyrical, almost operatic, almost biblical at times. She just talks to you throughout the novel. As she is telling these stories and bringing these characters to life, she comments on them and jokes about them…” (reviewed by Nicholas Jose in FiveBooks.)

The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/nicholas-jose-on-australian-novels ( )

I read this book, by a member of the Waanyi nation, for the Reading Globally Aboriginal Authors theme read. It takes place in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia, and merges aboriginal origin myths with the lives and history of contemporary aboriginal people and their interactions with the nearby white town, especially when an international mining company brings the "largest mine of its kind" to the area. What I found most interesting was the portrait of the harsh climate and ecology of the region and the people's deep connections with and knowledge of both the land and the sea, as well as the look at how they live now. The aboriginal people, many members of one family, are vividly characterized. Ultimately, though, I was a little frustrated by it: it starts out slowly, introducing a variety of seemingly unconnected people/stories; after the plot picks up, it moves along more rapidly, but the ending was a little too melodramatic and fantastical for me. It is a very worthwhile read, though, for the wonderful portrait of place, myth, and people.

Alexis Wright's Carpentaria is masterful. Her voice is singular yet easily understandable—provided one's comfortable with point-of-view shifts and nonlinear narratives.

The story largely centers around the Phantom family, Norm and Will, father and son respectively, who are aboriginals living on the peripheral of a rural Australian settler town. A mining concern invades and the novel's literal conflict begins here.

While there's much that can and should be said about this novel, I'll bring up several aspects that I found especially noteworthy.

Dreamtime metaphysics infuse the novel's narrative consciousness. (In fact, were I forced to declare 'what does this novel tell us,' it might be something like, it's high time to wake up for dreamtime.) What's especially excellent about Wright's book is one does not need much knowledge, if any at all, about dreamtime to get an idea of how it works, at least on something of an intuitive level.

With the possible exception of William Faulkner's work, I've rarely read fiction that explains small town life with such deft precision, with such lack of self-congratulatory folksiness. If you live in the sticks, you'll find this book provides great solace.

Her style is also similar to that of Faulkner—though a bit less dense and more clearly post-colonial in its orientation.

If you like highly-stylized, multicultural books that force reflection, this is a must read. ( )