Alexis Wright

Wow, what a book. A huge tome. I struggled understanding many parts of it but the writing dazzled me. It was like nothing I have ever read. What ambition and imagination. Ecological magical realism with a satirical flavor. Mythological tales mixed with contemporary references all mashed together in a way where time seems relative and phrases are repeated over and over in that they seem to act like an incantation at times. The circularity of the narrative defamiliarizes the reader. Yet, this show more is an angry political novel too. It's not merely fanciful tales of donkeys and butterflies but it delivers warnings of a hazy, burning world. show less

This is a difficult novel to parse, but it is well worth the effort. Wright has done something truly unique here, bridging the "White" Australian world with the "Waanyi" Australian world. Individual sentences will simultaneously check every box of beautifully written Western literary fiction and plop readers into the dream world of Waanyi magical realism. Vocabulary of both, worldviews of both, combine into a saga not only of a family but of a town caught between cultures. There's a lot show more here; it's long, and it's a slow read. It's also truly immersive. I learned a lot about the unique Australian postcolonial landscape and the Waanyi culture's experience contemplating (white) modernity. I also enjoyed the story. show less

Astounding. A completely new literary experience. My advice: Read it slowly. Like you should read the Bible.

Alexis Wright has done something I haven’t encountered before. A big thick book of yarns. Australian indigenous yarning about the fella, Tracker Tilmouth. Once I got the rhythm, I was in. Tracker became the daily yarn, listening to the stories from one or two who knew the man.

And just like reading the Bible, Wright provides a superstructure that gives each little yarn a place in a show more bigger story. Some kind of Messianic motif that blends yarns into a meta-yarn. show less

This baffling, dreamlike epic rushes you up in a semi-conscious swirl of language into the wild tropical north of Australia, where Queensland sweeps round to cradle an armful of the Pacific in the form of the Gulf of Carpentaria – a land of savannas and tropical cyclones, of eucalypts and estuary streams, melaleucas, songlines, unscrupulous mining corporations, and back-country bogan settlements.

The Gulf country is also the homeland of the Waanyi people, from whom Alexis Wright is show more descended on her mother's side, and what Carpentaria is most obviously and essentially is a hymn to her people and to her home. It seems necessary to establish this, because it can be difficult to work out what else it might be. Postcolonial epic? Magic-realist fantasy? Indigenous polemic?

The book doesn't present itself as a simple proposition. At more than 500 pages, it feels, just from heaving the thing up in front of your face, like something that will require some work. And the language is constantly wrong-footing you as a reader – like something that's been run through Google Translate and back twice, full of not-quite-right constructions (‘for no good rhyme or reason’), redundancies (‘it fell down, descended down’), misused verbs (‘the thought abhorred him’), even apparent spelling mistakes (‘the mother load’) which might just be editorial slips but which nevertheless contribute to a general sense that language here is unstable, not always to be trusted.

When you read Wright's sentences, you do it gingerly, feeling ahead with your toes, not wanting to put your full weight on a phrase until you're sure it will hold. It reminded me a bit of reading Steve Aylett, though the tone couldn't be more different. Here the method is a kind of Aboriginal English that dares you to think of it as ‘broken’, mixing myth, jokes, and natural history. And then – every now and again – it will suddenly explode into some long, flawlessly poetic excursion positively drenched in the local landscape:

Thousands of dry balls of lemon-coloured spinifex, uprooted by the storm, rolled into town and were swept out to sea. From the termite mounds dotting the old country the dust storm gathered up untold swarms of flying ants dizzy with the smell of rain and sent them flying with the wind. Dead birds flew past. Animals racing in frightened droves were left behind in full flight, impaled on barbed-wire spikes along the boundary fences. In the sheddings of the earth's waste, plastic shopping bags from the rubbish dump rose up like ghosts into the troposphere of red skies to be taken for a ride, far away. Way out above the ocean, the pollution of dust and wind-ripped pieces of plastic gathered, then dropped with the salty humidity and sank in the waters far below, to become the unsightly decoration of a groper's highway deep in the sea.

The nearest thing we have to a hero is the patriarch Normal Phantom, who lives in an indigenous settlement outside the town of Desperance. Norm's community is in a long-running feud with another Aboriginal group on the other side of the village; and between them are the whitefellas of Uptown, run by the violent Mayor Bruiser, policed by the corrupt Officer Truthful, and inhabited by a roster of colourful characters like Lloydie, who runs the pub and is in love with a mermaid trapped in the wood of his bar. Meanwhile Norm's partner, Angel Day, has run off with the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, who leads a convoy endlessly following the Dreaming tracks, while his son Will Phantom is mounting a violent resistance against the local mining corporation…

These are figures that at times seem like characters in a joke (‘An Englishman, and Irishman and an Australian walked into a bar…’), and at other times assume the epic quality of mythic archetypes. Their stories blur into one another, with narratives that follow multiple timelines simultaneously, or loop back on themselves without warning. This is not a case of ‘magic realism’ (an unsatisfactory term), performed for metaphorical effect; rather, it deliberately reflects, I think, a completely different view of the world, one in which time and individuals are not especially important, and where the events of distant myth play an active role in current relationships and causalities.

The language of the novel is richly localised, busy with snappy gums, spearwood, eskies, myalls, skerricks, whirly-winds, gibber stones, sooty grunters, min min lights, big bikkies and a host of other Australianisms that pushed my [book:Australian National Dictionary|31867703] to the limits. Not to mention the many Aboriginal terms. The last time the Waanyi language was surveyed, in the early 80s, researchers found ‘about ten’ native speakers, so it's doubtless extinct by now; Carpentaria is, in this as in other things, an act of preservation as well as of modernisation.

I just don't know who to recommend it to. After a hundred pages I didn't understand it at all. After two hundred pages I thought I understood it, and didn't like it. I might easily have ditched it there, but the book review hanging over my head induced me to carry on – fortunately. After three hundred pages I was gripped, and by the time I finished I was deeply moved. Since then it's only kept expanding in my head, so that I now feel it's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in a long time. Lyrical, passionate, and seemingly detached from all the usual artistic traditions, it feels like you're hearing the genuine voice of a strange and distant land that has not been shown in literature before. show less