The Voices - Softcover

Elderkin, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141706 ISBN 13: 9780802141705

Publisher: Grove Press, 2004

Synopsis

In the remote, blood red dust of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint finds guidance not from his parents or their Western culture but from the landscape itself. He turns to the outback, drawing the only joy he’s known from simply watching and mimicking the kangaroos. On his trips alone to the bush near his home, he begins to hear the Voices of the country, inscrutable figures that are alternately repulsed and attracted by the modern world. Alone, they squabble with themselves and the Wind, ever slighted by the Aboriginals who no longer hear them. They turn to Billy, sensing that he, although white, may be their last hope for survival. But it is Maisie, an enigmatic and ghostly Aborigine girl, and a friend to the Voices, who befriends Billy on one of his forays, and together they explore the land and each other’s worlds, leaving the Voices to wallow in their sloth and despair. As Billy ventures further into the untamed land, his parents are drawn deeper into their own private miseries, unable to reach out to their son before he drifts away. Confused by the quiet desperation at home, and terrified of the power he finds in the Voices of the bush, Billy flees to the relative safety and quiet of an underground mining community. The cacophonous sounds of the mine drown out the Voices, and he begins to feel relatively safe within this new community.

Ten years later Billy is alone in a hospital, recovering from gruesome wounds of mysterious origin. Protecting him from the prying of the doctors, who believe him a dangerous schizophrenic responsible for the mad beating of a man on a train, is Cecily, an aboriginal nurse, and in her Billy finds an unlikely ally as he struggles to piece himself back together. For it is Cecily who understands what his wounds signify, even if she has never seen them on a white man before. Shifting between his hospital stay and the childhood that lead him there, The Voices unfolds into a mesmerizing exploration of the relationship between a man, the land he loves, and the spirits of the country, struggling to be heard before it is too late.

With her haunting and psychologically complex tale of one boy who has internalized the trauma and the schisms of his land and its history, Elderkin boldly exposes the long and forceful arm of institutionalized injustice, and the inescapable hold of collective memory. The Voices is an extraordinary accomplishment.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Elderkin is the acclaimed author of Sunset over Chocolate Mountains. Born in 1968, she has worked as an ice-cream seller, an English teacher in a Slovakian shoe factory and, for the past five years, as a freelance journalist. She lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly

The ancestral voices of aborigine spirits play a prominent role in Elderkin's second novel (after Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains), the erratic story of a white boy's coming of age. Billy Saint grows up identifying with kangaroos and communing with nature near his tiny village north of Alice Springs, tendencies that bewilder his mother, Crystal, and her passive husband, Stan, a car mechanic. Billy's troubles begin when he is 16 and he meets a mysterious native girl named Maisie during his wanderings. On an expedition they take together in a car Billy borrows from his father, Maisie calls on hostile spirits and Billy flees, hitting a kangaroo and barely making it home. His injuries include an odd genital mutilation, which happens to be part of an aborigine ritual. Soon after the incident, Billy runs away and becomes a miner, only to encounter the spirits years later, in his early 20s. Most of the story is told in extended flashbacks as the adult Billy lies in a hospital bed, recovering from another l attack by the spirits. Maisie's charms, Elderkin's vivid prose and the limited but effective appearances of spirits make the narrative haunting and intriguing in the early going. But in the novel's second half the voices turn increasingly lurid and cartoonish, and Elderkin's tendency to skip back and forth in time muddies the story. The subplots don't help; one involving Crystal's affair with an aborigine falls flat, and another in which the spirits murder a female tourist when she visits a sacred rock is over the top. Elderkin has some success capturing native Australian spirituality in a way that mirrors her use of the Arizona desert for atmosphere in Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, but a bit more balance and restraint might have heightened the effect.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0802141706
• ISBN 13: 9780802141705
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336