The Swan Book

June 20, 2016
Fraying the edges of reality, Wright mixes a dystopian future with ancient mythology and folklore to create a book charged with razor-sharp wit, linguistic acumen, and an astoundingly vivid imagination. Climate change has wreaked havoc on Australia, creating war, famine, and dust. The eccentric Bella Donna finds Oblivia Ethylene beneath a gum tree, the victim of a horrible assault. She raises the girl in the rusted-out hulk of a warship run aground in the middle of a swamp designated as a detention camp for Aboriginal Australians, and tells Oblivia stories about the swans and ghosts that inhabit the swamp. Warren Finch, the darling of society and the first Aboriginal president of Australia, visits the camp promising rights to the people of the swamp, and forcibly takes Oblivia, who's barely in her teens, to be his wife. Wright, winner of the Miles Franklin Award and a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpenteria, has crafted a multilayered and magical novel firmly rooted in the issues of the present day. Told in dense prose full of evocative imagery, Wright's book deftly highlights the racial and cultural politics facing Australia's indigenous people in a story that defies genre. It is a challenging and heartbreaking story that illuminates the culture and struggles of an often overlooked people.

April 1, 2016
A severely damaged girl embodies the soul of the Australian continent in Wright's searing dystopian novel. Wright (Carpenteria, 2010, etc.) plunges the reader directly into the chaotic world of the lost Aboriginal teen her eccentric rescuer names Oblivia Ethelyne. Rendered mute by the traumatic experience of a gang rape, Oblivia is hiding in the "deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree" when old Bella Donna, herself an escapee from a northern Europe now devastated by climate change, finds her and takes her to live in an abandoned ship floating on a polluted swamp inside a detention camp for Aboriginals. Here the heroine makes friends with the black swans of the swamp before she is taken away by brutal "boy genius" Warren Finch, who is about to become "the head of state of a dilapidated country in a dilapidated world." After a grueling journey across the desert to a "skewed dream of a city" in southern Australia, Warren locks up his new bride like a princess in a castle while he travels around with a look-alike "television wife," leaving Oblivia to consort with ghosts, rats, and a lice-ridden old snow monkey while she does her best to liberate the swans that have faithfully stuck with her and bring them home. In this nearly dialogue-free novel, the author pays little attention to character development, instead creating an impressionistic vision of a near future where humanity has nearly destroyed the natural world. While the relatively simple story could be told more concisely, and Wright's use of language can be more exuberant than precise, Oblivia's epic journey provides a strong thread to draw the reader through a sometimes-cluttered verbal landscape. Readers up to the challenge may enjoy puzzling through Wright's intricate, imperfectly explained mythology, while others may find the narrative obstacles thrown up along the way too much bother.

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January 1, 2016
In the near future, climate-change wars have all but destroyed the Northern Hemisphere, while in Australia a dried-up swamp effectively serves as a detention camp for indigenous peoples. Still, it's a haven for Oblivia Ethelyne--until Australia's first Aboriginal president sweeps in and asks her to marry him. An Australian Literature Society Gold Medal winner.

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