Carpentaria

Carpentaria is an exceptionally well-written and well-conceived novel that highlights the often deadly strife between Australia's Aboriginal people and the whites who took over and run the country/continent. Alexis Wright uses gorgeous, mystically spiritual, and fantastical description in stark contrast with the ugly facts of life in this cultural conflict, focusing on the experiences of one Aboriginal family, the Phantoms. Normal Phantom, or Norm, the family elder, is a complicated man familiar with the sea and fishing to a deeply spiritual extent, and we learn midway through the novel that he not only catches fish for food, he preserves them in a feat of artistic craftsmanship that makes the dead fish come alive with bright, better-than-lifelike, nearly magical colors. Norm is the lead voice in the novel, and the experiences Wright relates are filtered through his vision, his experiences, his prejudices, his loves, and his hatreds. The setting is a tiny, fictional town, Desperance, (the similarity to the word desperate is not coincidental) located near the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland, the northernmost part of Australia. Desperance is run by a crowd of mean-spirited whites who have made it their business to not only put down, but to steal the native lands of, the local Aboriginals and hand over mining rights to an international company -- providing the area with jobs but also environmental despoilation. Dividing their power against the whites, the local Aboriginals have split into to camps, one of which opposed the mine's presence and the other which accepted it and its promise of payment. Norm Phantom opposed the mine, and one of the Phantom sons, Will, has plotted and performed acts against the mine that result in his being hunted by both mine and government officials. However, by marrying a woman from the opposing Aboriginal group, he has deeply alienated Norm. Much of the "action" in the novel swirls around anti-mine activity and the mine's retaliation for the opposition group's political and overtly violent attempts to put the mine out of business. This is not an easy read, by any means. Alexis Wright's style is non-linear and episodic rather than traditional, often rapidly switching points of view, time, scene, and setting. There are many characters whose journeys weave together and apart. The reader needs to pay attention to bits of information incorporated in each scene in order to decipher where one is in the larger tale, and to keep track of the relationships between and among the characters. Following the various characters' points of view and flights of imagination is a true joy, however, and well worth the effort to keep the plot threads held together -- the resulting fabric is a masterpiece of color and pattern woven together with great skill.

"Carpentaria" is an incredible novel. The second fictional work from Alexis Wright, it deals with sweeping issues such as the clash of cultures in Australia, the different goals and focuses of whites vs. those of the native Aboriginals; and does so by looking at just one small imaginary town which the author calls Desperance which is located on the very real Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland. The relations between black and white Australia play out on the small stage of Desperance, often in a violent way. The main characters in the novel are from the Phantom family, headed by Norm Phantom, though certainly his son Will is also a key character. The characters are vivid and believable, the events are at times a bit fantastic, though as the story moves between Dreamtime and reality with a bit of legend and biblical epic mixed in it is sometimes impossible to know just how real the events are supposed to be. The story is epic in length at over 500 pages, and though takes place in such a remote and small location, it is epic also in the scope as it deals with society on many levels, including business, politics, religion, culture, and law. It is also a book which begs to be read and re-read over and over, as there is so much to take in one can hardly absorb everything it has to say in a single reading. This book was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, which is Australia's most prestigious award which is given to a "published novel or play which portrays Australian life in any of its phases." Alexis Wright is only the second Aboriginal writer to receive the award. Alexis Wright also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction as a result of this novel. That being said, some readers may find difficulty in reading this book. It is not written in a traditional style as characters come and go and side stories seemingly take the reader on journeys which can sometimes leave the reader scratching their head. For myself, I enjoyed this ride, and I believe it is done purposefully to help the reader not focus too much on any particular character, but the larger issues being represented in the story.

How to rate this book? Five stars for the unusual quality of the writing and its unique voice? Or three, to reflect the difficulty I had getting into it? I am going with five, because the quality is indisputable while my reading problems may well be my own; a compromise would neither do justice to this extraordinary book, nor be an adequate warning to the unsuspecting reader. The setting is the fictional town of Desperance, by the Gulf of Carpentaria on the North coast of Australia. A small citizenry of self-satisfied whites live Uptown, surrounded on three sides by shanty communities of aborigines, who refer to themselves as Pricklebush people. These are their stories: families and splinters of families, living together, splitting, fighting, and coming together again. They are a people living on the outskirts, among the debris of the modern world, yet tied in often-inexplicable ways to the land or the sea. They are a religious people who look for marvels in the most unlikely places: Normal Phantom's oil-matted cockatoo who "went with the pilgrimage to Alice Springs in the 1980s to be blessed by the Pope"; golden-skinned Elias Smith who had simply walked out of the sea one day like the coming of a prophet; or Mozzie Fishman, a second Moses, leading convoys of battered cars from one end of the country to another, following the ancient Dreamways. And the writing! Here are Mozzie's followers starting out on another morning of their journey: "The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every watercourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony for the guardians of Gondwanaland." This is one of Alexis Wright's simpler passages, but it shows her extraordinary combination of literary sophistication with the aboriginal spirit that is her birthright. When she really gets going, she has a jazzy language that is part Salman Rushdie, part Nashville, and entirely her own: "Over time, the whirly-whirly local winds composed much of the new music for the modern times. The winds squeezed through every crack and hole to loosen sheets of corrugated iron for the salt in the air to rust nails that went pop, until all those old pieces of tin whined, whistled, banged, and clapped. Every day, all day and all night sometimes, the town jammed jazz with bits of loose tin slapping around on top of the mud-stained fibro walls to pummel the crumbling, white-ant-ridden, honeycombed timber frames, until one day, only paint held up those buildings." So what's not to like? CARPENTARIA is a novel in much the same sense that Steinbeck'

Carpentaria is a book that is barely able to contain itself. The pacing is off, the narration at times veers into the absurd and the characters seem to wander in and out, but just like some of the best books, it all culminates in a beautiful way. This is one of those books where the pieces are only minor but when placed together - there is a sprawling work of art laid out in front of you that encapsulates all of your senses through the sheer will, and brilliance, of Wright's mastery. The plot revolves around a town, Desperance, and the lives of its inhabitants that are being destroyed by a mining company and the white people it brings with them to the Aboriginal lands. Of course, I'm over simplifying, this book is 500 pages. It is near impossible to say how entrancing this book truly is. Wright's Carpentaria is truly a work of art and deserves to be read. It carries its own life and mood. There is a depth of beauty and pain to it that sets it apart from what comes along as fiction these days. Interwoven into the pages is an honest truth that we can all understand.