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.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

When the mud dried...

Claypans breathed like skin, and you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones.  The old people said it was the world stirring itself, right down to the sea.  Sometimes, in Desperance, everyone heard the drying mud crack in the vast claypans.  You could hear the ground groaning, splitting its epidermis into channels of deep cuts all across the ground.  It looked like a fisherman's net, except it was red-brown, and it trapped whatever was down below from breaking through to the surface.  It made you think that whatever it was living down underneath your feet was much bigger than you, and that gave them old clan folk real power.  They said it was a good reason to keep on living right where they were.  Keep it right.  Everyone had to keep fighting those old spirit wars, on either side of that, Got nothing, going nowhere neither, Uptown.

The Gulf of Carpentaria is the immense bight between Australia's two "horns" in the tropical north.  Aboriginal communities along it are more numerous than elsewhere in the country; Arnhem Land on the west coast of the gulf, in the Northern Territory, is mostly outstation communities with few white residents at all.  Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria is set on the east side, along the Queensland coast, in a town called Desperance, where tensions between "Uptown"--the white section--and "Pricklebush"--the aboriginal one--are high.

Both communities, but especially Uptown, function as characters themselves, with collective motivation and agency.  Wright names a few actual Uptowners--there's the mayor, unironically named "Bruiser," police officer Truthful--but mostly, they act in concert and are written about that way.  Uptown gossips, Uptown rages, Uptown schemes.  They gossip, rage, and scheme against "the Pricklebush mob," and the tensions between them are depressingly recognizable from an American standpoint: at one point late in the novel, an aboriginal boy is badly beaten in revenge for a white man's death, though he had nothing to do it.  At another, three other aboriginal boys hang themselves after being arrested for a murder they did not commit.  Much of the tension centers around the recent creation of a mine, which has quickly become the economic heart of Desperance, even as it desecrates sacred ground.

"Pricklebush," by contrast, sometimes functions collectively, but more often is described with its own interior tensions.  Early in the novel, a disagreement over a statue of the Virgin Mary discovered in a trash heap (???) divides the town into two parts, half of whom angrily storm off to live on the east side.  The Pricklebush mob end up, in a kind of ironic twist on white colonialism, literally surrounding the white community.  There are tensions within the aboriginal community about the nature of the mine; many rely on it for work but others are suspicious of its sinister power.  Before the events of the novel, Pricklebush resident Will Phantom led a campaign of sabotage against the mine, before heading out on the lam with a traveling convoy on walkabout through the songlines of northeastern Australia.  Will's actions form the context of much of the novel: the tensions within Pricklebush, the tensions between Pricklebush and Uptown, and the tensions within his own family: his father, Norm, has more or less disavowed him.

All of that makes this novel seem much more ordinary than it really is.  The magical realism is heavy here: early in the book a white man walks into town from the sea without any memory of who he is.  This man, Elias, a close friend of Norm and Will (and perhaps a symbolic suggestion that if white people are going to get along with aboriginal folks they have to divest themselves of a long memory and history) ends up being killed by the mine for reasons that were not quite clear to me; a big chunk of the plot involves the safe passage of his miraculously preserved body to a mystical place in the sea where giant grouper guide boats.  The figures of aboriginal religion are present and real here, and they have as real an impact on what happens as the gods of the Iliad.  One memorable minor character is in love with a mermaid trapped in the wooden bar of his pub.

The writing itself adds to the strangeness.  Wright's style is both wordy and casual, and the mystical nature of the plot is balanced by colloquialisms that ally the narrator with the Pricklebush mob.  Sometimes it veers weirdly into cliche, but cliches that are never quite wielded in the way you expect:

It is important to say straight up that it was no good at all for Elias coming in from the sea empty-handed like he was, and no good being anywhere with an empty head with even less than ten cents' worth of the richness of his own memory anymore.  If you put an empty shell in struggle town, or Uptown like the prickly bush mob called it, expect a ton of bad things to happen.  His was a lethal combination; he would have been better off being an ant under a leaf if he had zilch left, not even his memory for a bit of trade.

Part of me wants to say this really needs editing, but part of me feels that cutting away at it might only make the novel, which is so sui generis, more like everything else.  But it is a lot to wade through for 500 pages, and reflects the novel's overall shagginess and aimlessness.  The conflict over the mine is a macguffin, really; although there's an action movie-like scene where Will is picked up in a helicopter by nefarious badguys, Wright isn't interested in anything like a conventional protest narrative.  The most evocative scenes in the novel are typically the ones in which a character is alone with the forces of nature, or their spiritual analogues: Norm drifting at sea, or through a mangrove forest, Will in the outback or in the middle of a cyclone.  It's in those scenes that the true spirit of the novel, both in its weirdness and affection for this remote part of the world, really comes to life.