The big blue sea, Peron Dunes, St Helens, Tasmania. January 2019.
There is a halfway-decent book in this book. Unfortunately, that book is spoiled by some pedestrian drivel that somehow made the final copy. I scratch my head at how an editor has allowed some of this to make the final copy.
I must confess that I find magical realism approaches more tiresome than playful, but I am always prepared to give an author some license to tell their story. Alas, amidst some beautiful writing, there is a lot of guff here. Elements of the book resemble a range of exercises assigned to young writers cobbled together to make a coherent whole.
I shall start with the bad. The chapter Fur – an epistolary exchange of letters – is dominated by the exhausting voice of an idiosyncratic and boorish artisan coffin maker. It reads like the kind of Year 12 creative writing piece that you can get away with when training your muscles, but you’d never publish. It does little to advance the story and jars with what has come before.
That said, Cake is little more than the kind of cultural cringe that wasn’t funny the first few hundred times. It’s like a knock-off Kath and Kim reject that ambles along for a forced punchline that was not at all worth the wait. When you find yourself saying out aloud to a novel, “Oh do fuck off” at the end of a chapter two-thirds of the way through, you know you’re struggling.
To conclude with the negative, two other chapters that stood out for me. Ice is an awkward attempt at the hard-boiled noir of Hammett and Chandler, but I couldn’t work out if it were homage or parody. Feather is an unconvincing set of diary extracts (extracted by whom and how we’ll never know) of an insane wombat-pelt farmer in the far southwest of Tasmania – (◔_◔) – seems a pointless diversion that seemed a ham-fisted way to advance the story.
So why did I finish it? Well, there’s some lovely writing there. While I found the magical-realism of man and seal working as one (to exploit an imaginary tuna fish, no less) unnecessary, Salt offers a vivid description of the movement of the sea, the shift of the light when diving and surfacing, the feel of bursting lungs and frigid cold. Unlike much of the rest of the book, this is terrific writing. Now, it’s Tim Winton’s writing, but I am forgiving of a new author’s inspirations staying close to the surface in the early days.
To my mind, the two best chapters – and what the book could have been all way through, are Iron and Coal. The former is true whimsy and told from a rakali's perspective, (yes, the viewpoint of a little native water rat). It is lovely writing and is true to the central premise of the work. A pity that it was a brief ten pages, as I could have read an entire novel of it.
The latter is the strongest work of the novel and frustrated me because it demonstrated real skill and the potential of much more effective work. Like Iron, Coal is the most ‘magical-realist’ of the entire novel. It effectively and convincingly tied together with the wide narrative arc together and showcased the story's fundamental elements in a way that kept me reading.
We rarely see hyped novels out of Tasmania, and I looked forward to reading this one immensely. The fact that most of my Goodreads colleagues rated it almost universally four or five stars only encouraged me further. I presume that people are granting Arnott a fair bit of leeway in their assessments because this looked like a failed experiment with momentary flashes of class.
★ ★ 1/2
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