The Hunter

Fascinating, but grim. M, the hunter, overcomes physical pain and emotional distraction to focus on his prey, the legendary Tasmanian Tiger, thought to be extinct. M is the modern world although he ironically considers himself a natural man. He is a mercenary who divests himself of all moral concerns in his zeal to succeed. The tiger, like Blake's tiger, is a mystery whose demise is as certain as such outdated sentiments as compassion and fidelity. What we are becoming relentlessly stalks what we once were.

Julia Leigh has succeeded in one thing with this book: she leaves a lasting image on the reader. Everything--from writing in present tense to giving her main character only a letter for a name--suggests she's more poet than novelist and definitely more neo than classical. While development goes from fascinating to creepy, the reader can't help but read, read, read...and you just can't escape. It's like a train wreck--you just can't look away.

This short novel pulls no punches. It is beautifully written, and I note that the author has received praise from no less than Don DeLillo: "a strong and hypnotic piece of writing". Leigh's descriptions of the Tasmanian wilderness transport the reader into another world. Haven't read a survival story - physical, emotional, ecological - like it.

I have read many contemporary Australian novels in the past few years, and this was one of the most interesting. Its immediate subject is the search for a living specimen of the apparently extinct thylacine or Tasmanian `tiger'. The main character, Martin David or M, has been hired by biotechnological interests to secure a living specimen of the thylacine which he can then kill and clone. As he searches for the animal, he is confronted with an unexpected obstacle: the domesticity represented by Lucy Armstrong, the woman with whom he is lodging, and her two odd children Bike and Sass. Jarrah Armstrong, the husband and father of the family, has vanished in the same mountains where M is pursuing his quarry; M feels a double identification with Jarrah as he faces the same risks in the wild as did his predecessor. In addition he feels the danger, or the promise, of being co-opted into Jarrah's domestic role. Though M is attracted to Lucy and has warm feelings for the children, he warily holds on to his own male solitude, an allegiance also figured in his response to the femininity of the last thylacine itself. This is a vivid, compelling narrative whose significance does not just reside in its own details. It clearly is an allegory of `globalization', where M is the metropolitan outsider seeking to exploit the environment, and the nature and people of Tasmania represent a local particularity in danger of being absorbed into the global. The paradox here is that the global cannot operate without the content, the materiality, provided by the local. So M and the global concerns he represent NEED Tasmania, and the thylacine, even as they try to exploit it for the purposes of the global machine. The writing here is so vividly pictorial that these intellectual issues never tower above the novel's exciting plot. They are there for those who are interested, but on its own strength Julia Leigh's novel is a gripping read full of both adventure and mystery.