Synopsis
When two bodies wash up on the river bank in a frontier town in Australia and the aborigines are blamed for the murder, racial hatred erupts, causing resentment among the aborigines and fear among the whites
Reviews
Thubron is a British travel writer ( Where Nights Are Longest ) and novelist ( A Cruel Madness ) whose sense of atmosphere and character may remind the reader of Graham Greene, without seeming at all derivative. This novel has a rather portentous allegorical framework: in an unnamed country, presumably somewhere in Africa, hero Rayner (no first name) is a doctor struggling with a mysterious disease in a provincial town set in a wilderness inhabited by primitive bush people. He dreams nostalgically of the langorous, more cultivated coastal capital city where he grew up. After murders of townspeople by the savages, racial hatred begins to fester. Rayner, fascinated by the savages, becomes increasingly involved in their lives of apparent exile from an imagined paradise, and when he has a longed-for opportunity to return to the capital from which he was once exiled, he refuses to take it. Though the framework is heavy, Thubron's writing has remarkable vigor and fluency; and in Rayner's relationships--with the dancer Zoe, and with Ivar, a childhood friend who is now a rather sinister army officer--he shows sharp psychological insight and creates considerable pathos. In the end the book becomes a moving lament for a vanished world and for the difficulties of human communication. It's by no means a casual read, but an ultimately rewarding one.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Outcasts from paradise haunted by death, disease, and drought have a moment of reprieve in this finely crafted--if ultimately hollow--fable by 1991 Booker Prize nominee Thubron (Falling, 1991, etc.). Set in a mythical authoritarian subtropical country between the two World Wars, this is ostensibly the story of a ``purpose town''--a place where ``nobody arrived for pleasure.'' Like protagonist Rayner, who's been sent from the capital to be one of town's two doctors, the citizens come to work, to pioneer, but not to leave--that's forbidden, unless special permission is given. The town itself, where ``nothing is older than a century,'' is surrounded by parched lands where bands of mysterious natives still practice their traditional customs. The despair of this ``conflation of exiles'' is further exacerbated when murdered bodies appear in the town and on the outskirts; a strange disfiguring rash spreads; and a long-endured drought makes the natives bellicose. Rayner yearns for the capital--``the shimmering city on the coast''--and dreams of old friends and loves he knew there. A love affair with dancer Zoe is not enough to cure his obsession; but on a visit to the capital, Rayner finds that paradise is not quite as he remembered. He returns to the town, feeling ``an intangible burden to be lifting''; and on patrol with the army, he witnesses a poignant ceremony in which the natives, hoping to climb back to heaven on their special tree that had stopped growing, try to prevent the sun setting so that everything ``will be all right again.'' The army does not fire on the natives, as they had intended; the rains come; and Rayner realizes that there is still Zoe. Hell is all there is, perhaps, but there are compensations. Atmosphere, mood, and place are all marvelously evoked, but the underlying theme is too spelled out, and not particularly new. Clever, beautiful, but disappointing. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The aborigines believe that if they can turn back the sun, prevent it from "dying" each night, then the tree that once connected heaven and earth will flourish anew and "everything will be all right." Rayner is a doctor temporarily assigned to an army unit sent to pacify these "savages," a few of whom have been raiding the outlying farms of this unspecified frontier town at a time of severe drought. As he watches them perform the "djannu" ritual, it seems for an instant that the sun does freeze on the horizon before inexorably resuming its journey. Nominated for the 1991 Booker Prize, this cryptic novel by a well-known British travel writer/novelist is a rumination on both our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life and the resilience of the human spirit. In the face of the violence (not necessarily aboriginal) brought on by feelings of helplessness and fear of the unknown, Rayner discovers the power of love and of belief. Intelligent and lyrical in its evocation of life on the fringe of civilization, this book should attract a relatively small but discriminating audience. For larger collections of serious fiction.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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