2017 Reading Challenge - Carpentaria

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (read by Isaac Drandich)

Reason for Reading: A while back, I caught the first episode of a series called Cleverman, which has joined the list of stuff I Will Get Back to One Day. I've mostly put off watching it because it's a pretty dense piece of work, and quality, thoughtful TV requires more focus than I necessarily have to spare from family life from day to day. Anyway, this prompted me to add Australian literature to my challenge list, specifically seeking out Aboriginal writers. The research I was able to do with my limited time and resources turned up two significant titles: The Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, and Carpentaria.

Sometimes comic, often tragic, Carpentaria presents the struggle of an indigenous people to retain their meaning and relevance in the face of a world that wants to forget their stories. In a rambling, non-linear narrative, the novel tells the story of the town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the aboriginal families of the Pricklebush live uncomfortably alongside the white folks of Uptown. Through the lives of Pricklebush patriarch Normal Phantom and of his estranged son Will, of travelling religious leader Mozzie Fishman, of Norm's wife Angel Day and of Elias, an amnesiac white man washed ashore on the beach, and through the blending of the natural world, Christianity and the ancestral spirit world of the Queensland Aborigines, Wright weaves a tale that, although set about fifty years later and on the other side of the world, is a close match for the first book in my challenge, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The parallels are not so exact as to suggest plagiarism, merely indicative of similar influences. Both are set in isolated, ill-founded towns – Desperance was created as a deep-water port, only for the river to shift course and leave it locked behind miles of mudflats and simultaneously exposed to cyclones – whose local worthies struggle against outside authority. Both towns hold strong against government interference, but capitulate to the crushing power of international capitalism; the Gurfurrit Mine takes the ancestral land of the Pricklebush mob, and offers them dangerous jobs in return. Both feature characters with their own, eccentric religious and philosophical views. They even both end with a catastrophic storm sweeping away all that has gone before. Where they differ markedly, however, is in their narrative voice, with Wright adopting the customs of oral storytelling in contrast to Garcia-Marquez's intense literary style. This is not to say that Carpentaria is less well-written than One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a meticulous piece of writing, where a deliberate rawness rubs shoulders with profound eloquence.

The next book on my list is That Deadman Dance, which is not available in audiobook or Kindle format, so will be approached in dead tree format, and an imposing format it is.