Webb, Jen

English

Robbie Arnott’s third novel Limberlost follows two impressive earlier works. Richard Flanagan described Arnott’s first book, Flames (2018), as “strange and joyous”. Bram Presser, responding to The Rain Heron (2020), credits Arnott with “singlehandedly reinventing Australian literature”.This new novel is likely to draw equally enthusiastic commentary. Its writing is alert to the language and imagery of mythology, and attuned to the living world. As such, Limberlost fits neatly within the rubric of eco-fiction: literature in which the natural world plays a major role, and where the associations and dependencies between human and natural worlds take centre stage

University of Canberra Research Repository

Academic rigour, journalistic flairJen WebbDean, Graduate Research, University of CanberraRobbie Arnott’s third novel Limberlost follows two impressive earlier works. Richard Flanagandescribed Arnott’s first book, Flames (2018), as “strange and joyous”. Bram Presser, responding to The Rain Heron (2020), credits Arnott with “singlehandedly reinventing Australian literature”.This new novel is likely to draw equally enthusiastic commentary. Its writing is alert to the languageand imagery of mythology, and attuned to the living world. As such, Limberlost fits neatly within therubric of eco-fiction: literature in which the natural world plays a major role, and where theassociations and dependencies between human and natural worlds take centre stage.Review: Limberlost – Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing).Humpback whale. Zorankovacevic/Wikimedia CommonsRobbie Arnott’s eco-fiction uses myth and metaphor to depicta wounded worldPublished: November 9, 2022 11.23am AEDTThe novel’s attention to these relationships is announced at the very beginning in the epigraph from Gene Stratton-Porter: “In the economy of Nature nothing is ever lost”. As the narrative unfolds, itbecomes clear that human economies, politics and practices too often override Nature’s economy,bringing catastrophe to both.Limberlost is not, however, a bleak story. Perhaps it is the mythological note sounding across thechapters that lifts it away from human failure and loss. Perhaps it is the central character, Ned, whoseems able to maintain a frail sense of hope. Perhaps it is the presence of the environment itself, andall the denizens of the natural world, whose ancient history renders our human aspirations andstupidities comparatively insignificant.A sense of mythThe writing in Limberlost is frequently exquisite. In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillardprovides an anecdote to animate her sense of what writers really need:A well-known writer was collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I couldbe a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know – do you like sentences?”Sentences, possibly even more than story and character and plot and description, are what constructthe vivid, fully experienced worlds of the best novels; and Arnott writes beautiful sentences.Limberlost is probably the only (excellent) novel I’ve read where the first sentence is set in the passivevoice: “It was believed …”, Arnott begins, in a move that would likely offend teachers of English andjournalism and creative writing (including me). Yet that opening line sets up the sense of myth – “Itwas believed that a whale had gone mad at the mouth of the river”.The rhythm of the sentence and the alliteration of “mad at the mouth” conspire to make this a potentbeginning. The mad whale story has no source, except perhaps in anxiety about the ways in whichNature fights back. It is not clear whether anyone has actually encountered the “mad” whale. Thestory is based first on “someone said”, then “another version claimed”, and then “there were othertheories too”.Ned’s father, William West, is not captured by theories or by myth. His orientation is toward theempirical. He bluntly dismisses the story as “nonsense”, borrows a boat, and takes five-year-old Nedout into the bay, along with Ned’s two older brothers, to see for their frightened selves the absence ofmad whales.This opening scene establishes the logic of the novel, which moves back and forth in time, shiftingbetween representations of human engagement with the natural world – sometimes of violence,sometimes of care – and family relationships that operate on much the same pattern.The violence against the country started generations earlier, as the adult Ned’s daughters tell himforcibly. They recount the history of invasion and settlement, and the accompanying violence: themassacres of Indigenous people and the ongoing record of loss and war and death.Ned’s father also embodies a traumatic past. He is a man “torn apart” by his own war, which hasturned him into a “quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable to his own sons”.His face is an “ever-open wound”. He seems to be reliving the catastrophe of the first world warduring the new war that has ensnared his older sons. Bill, the eldest, is in Singapore when it falls tothe Japanese army. Toby, part of the reserve forces, is comparatively safe and able to send lettershome. Their “faraway war-shadows” are threaded through the novel.Read more: Five must-read novels on the environment and climate crisisRobbie Arnott. Mitch Osborne/Text PublishingFreedom and selfhoodMuch of Limberlost focuses on 15-year-old Ned. He is effectively at war too, in his case with the localrabbits. He spends much of that year shooting and trapping as many as he can for their pelts. (Hisbest friend, Jackbird, says: “What’d a rabbit ever do to you?”) The rabbits, it seems, are metaphors asmuch as they are actualities. Like settler Australians, there seems to be “no end” to them and thedamage they do to this country.Their deaths provide for Ned’s most profound desire – a boat of his own. This is also a metaphor, ofcourse: for all the absences in his life, for his uncertainty about who he is and how to function in thisdifficult world. The longed-for boat is a small vessel, figuratively and literally, but it promises to helphim resolve “all the things he could not handle”. It will let them be “rinsed out of him”. Mostimportantly, the boat will allow him to return to and make sense of that evening on the water, wherehe waited “for the whale to explode out of the river and paste them into the waves”.Ned finds his boat, and the beauty and freedom and selfhood it promised. At first, it seems unlikely todeliver on this promise, being in very poor repair. But as Ned restores it, removes the old paint andpatches the holes, the boat comes to life. Its light aromatic Huon pine rides “the river so cleanly, sojoyously”.There are various threads running alongside and across the boat story. One is Ned’s growingattachment to Jackbird’s sister Callie. Like Ned’s family, like others in the district, she is tense, silent,stiff. She too is dealing with a wound that is, in part, the product of waiting hopefully, hopelessly, fornews of neighbours who are away at war.It is the product, too, of the struggle to get by financially and having to rely on rabbit massacres to paythe bills, feed the family. And as Ned’s daughters insist toward the end of the novel, this trope of thestoic Australian character is likely a product of the wounds inflicted on country and on people byinvasion. Shadowing the narrative, encoded in its mythical and symbolic dimensions, are all theunacknowledged massacres of the country’s traditional owners.Read more: In Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott has written an Australian horror story of uniquely local proportionsThe right thingYet another metaphor is the quoll, a carnivorous marsupial the locals name a “tiger cat”. Nedinadvertently traps one, but decides not to slaughter it for its pelt. He spares it for the value of itsshimmering life. At the cost of bites and scratches, he eases it back to health and fitness, and finallyreleases it into the forest.Eastern Quoll (dasyurus viverrinus) – John Gould (1863). Public domainThis choice to align himself with nature, rather than seek financial gain, could perhaps be aredemptive moment. But it’s equally likely that it is just another instance in the confused blunderingthrough the world of a young man who wants to do the right thing, if he could only figure out what theright thing might be.The right thing remains obscure. Ned lives in a wounded world, and he contributes to the damage,with the “heavy clouds of death” he sprays on his orchard to protect the fruit and the forests of treeshe fells. He calculatesthe violence he’d committed against the valley’s rabbits all summer. Catalogued the wounds,measured the blood.He knows that, in the end, this violence has produced very little of value. Still, his life is, both at 15and in his nineties, one worth living. It is a life that recognises the deep materiality and integrity of thenatural world.The whale from the opening chapter – that Moby Dick character – resurfaces throughout the novel. Inthe penultimate chapter, we are back with little Ned and his father and brothers in the borrowed boat,watching the not-mad mother whale and her calf watching them. Ned’s father tells the boys: “If you’regoing to fear something, boys, it’s best to understand it.” The willingness to recognise others, and tovalue observation and understanding over gossip and opinion, is something to take to the bank.

Robbie Arnott’s eco-fiction uses myth and metaphor to depict a wounded world

https://researchsystem.canberra.edu.au/ws/files/67497823/Robbie_Arnott_s_eco_fiction_uses_myth_and_metaphor_to_depict_a_wounded_world.pdf

Robbie Arnott’s eco-fiction uses myth and metaphor to depict a wounded world

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Canberra Research Repository