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kateybellew's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I honestly am struggling to rate, let alone review this book. It took me almost two weeks to read (at least twice as long as I’d expect to read 500 pages) and I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience. I ended up both reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook at the same time as I was finding it challenging to get through.
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.
There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.
Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?
“If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.” p. 11
“In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush family no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them… Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.” p. 94
“He talked and talked... When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours… Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance.” p. 272
“In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he tracked along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.” p. 286
“Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere?” p. 321
“No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by in a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do no want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.” p. 390
Content Warnings
Graphic: Physical abuse, Ableism, Racism, Hate crime, Child abuse, and Police brutality
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