Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Widespread Planet, same person as that piece of work Cause Man Steel, while thinking clear-headed higher rather than thinking low, was confident about how he would survive the climate emergency. He avoided the crowd--which meant humanity--and chose to be as some kind of crepuscular man, moving around the isolated bush by himself in the twilight hours in pursuit of his business venture, to put into action far more grandiose plans about how to make real money.

The aboriginal town of Praiseworthy in Australia's Northern Territory has been covered with an impenetrable haze. It's making everyone irritable, but it puts an idea into the head of one Cause Man Steel, who anticipates the worsening of climate change and the need for radical change: he'll collect a herd of feral donkeys that can be used for transport when fuel is no longer available. Cause, also known as Widespread and Planet--because he's. you know, everywhere--is especially in search of a special platinum-colored donkey he thinks will be the key to the whole scheme, for not particularly clear reasons. But the noisy, stinky donkeys only make Cause unpopular in town, and worsen the fractures in his own family: his wife Dance dreams of moving to China; his son Aboriginal Sovereignty commits suicide by drowning himself after being torn away from the younger girl who was his betrothed; his younger son Tommyhawk goes full-on "fascist" and tries to make his dreams of being adopted by the country's white minister of Aboriginal Affairs come true.

Above all, Praiseworthy is a satire on the paternalistic attitude of the Australian government towards Aboriginal people. The book presents a series of complaints, none of which I knew before: the government identified an epidemic of pedophilia among the country's outstation communities, banned pornography, keeps Aboriginal assets on a kind of controlled credit card with major restrictions. Aboriginal Sovereignty, a young man betrothed to a teenager (we never see her) is a victim of this paternalism, whereas his brother Tommyhawk absorbs the government propaganda wholeheartedly, considering everyone in Praiseworthy, including and especially his own father, a pedophile. And the "death of Aboriginal Sovereignty" has its own obvious secondary meaning, though Ab. Sov.'s death is more enigmatic and less final than such a phrase would seem. Cause, though short-sighted and selfish, represents a kind of trickster figure who stands against this paternalism, desperate to eke out a bit of autonomy and agency in a world that wishes to convince him it's better to play along.

This is the second book of Wright's I've read after Carpentaria, and I think I liked this one more, though it's possible that I was just better prepared for it. Wright's prose is still somewhat baffling to me, wordy and junky, full of cliches and weird circumlocutions. Nouns become adjectives and vice versa, and some of them even become verbs. I wondered more than once when reading both books if there's something about the strange, dense language that reflects Aboriginal dialect, but that would only be speculation on my part. I don't think I can get to the level of the writing being good, but it certainly works on its own terms, and the experience of diving into this 600-page tome is pretty brainmelting. I enjoyed it, but I'm glad to put it behind me, because it's one of those books that does something to your own words, you know? And moreso than in Carpentaria, I thought Praiseworthy reached more than once a feverish state where the clunky prose was transformed into something strikingly modernist, especially in the scenes where Aboriginal Sovereignty is described as mingling among the traditional spirits of the sea. Praiseworthy is one of those books I don't think I'd ever recommend, but if you get it, you get it.