Carpentaria

Starred review from February 23, 2009
This 2007 Miles Franklin award–winning novel is the latest masterpiece from Wright, an indigenous Australian author and land rights activist. In the town of Desperance, in northern Queensland, Australia, the question of land ownership is complicated, and every family stakes a claim. There's Normal Phantom's family, Mozzie Fishman's gang and the white settlers who control the region, but can't quite figure out how to get the native Pricklebush people to assimilate to the white man's ways. The drama unfolds with all the poetry and eclecticism of a Bob Dylan song: a drunken white mayor dismisses a murder case, a lying deaf policeman named Truthful has his way with Aboriginal women, and a brave young activist sabotages the town's mining industry. When the mythical Elias Smith, who appears in Desperance one day after “walking out of the sea,” is found murdered, a series of tragedies follows, awakening latent feuds and underlining the injustice of colonialism. Rarely does an author have such control of her words and her story: Wright's prose soars between the mythical and the colloquial.

March 1, 2009
A dreamlike novel from Australian aboriginal author Wright of a dreamtime interrupted as Australian native peoples meet industrial civilization.

If you can call it civilization, that is. Perched on the infernally hot salt flats of northern Queensland, at some distance from a sluggish river full of mud and"serpents and fish in the monsoon season," is a waterless port town named Desperance, the center of Wright's stately epic. Around Desperance—waterless so long that no one can remember when it stood near water—snakes a ring of aboriginal encampments, each a little more desperate than the next. In one lives a suggestively named old man, Normal Phantom, wise but somewhat feckless, given to making pronouncements in the voice of"a presidential Captain Hook." Inside another camp are the Eastend boys, ne'er-do-wells deluxe, who have their difficulties with the neighbors. After all, as the narrator quietly observes, this idea that people should live in harmony"was a policy designed by the invader's governments," and not really anything inherent in human nature. Among these"'edge' people, all of the blackfella mob living with quiet breathing in higgily-piggerly, rubbish-dump trash shacks," rivalries unfold, difficulties ensue and untoward events multiply. Imagine Gabriel Garc"a Márquez's fictional town Macondo set on dustier ground and with considerably more magic—and aboriginal mythology—worked into the magical realism, and you have some approximation of Wright's fluent tale, in which not much happens but a large cast of memorable characters are allowed to show themselves: a Bible-thumper, a psychopath whose motto is"Hit first, talk later," some quirky types and some just plain normal folk. Wright, a member of the Waanyi people, turns in stretches of mixed-language patois that is a pleasure but sometimes a challenge to follow ("Big cyclone coming, boy, everybody barrba, jayi, yurrngi-jbangka—you better come with us") as the tale winds its way to the end.

A latter-day epic that speaks, lyrically, to the realities and aspirations of aboriginal life.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from January 15, 2009
While most of its characters and events are based in the ragtag fictional northern Queensland town of Desperance, this book is a sprawling, surreal anti-"Odyssey" in which time and space contract and expand and experience takes place in the Dreamtime, on the sea, and on and under the continent of Australia. Normal Phantom, patriarch of an Aboriginal family residing in Westend Pricklebush, undertakes a harrowing spiritual journey. Seeking to do right by himself, his friends, and his people, Phantom faces one adversity after another. Though compromised and haunted by his relationships with othersamong them, his devastatingly erotic ex-wife, the corrupted patriarch of a rival Eastend clan, a traveling Aboriginal holy man, and Will Phantom, the prodigal son who defies his father by acting against the personal and institutional tyranny of the local white officials and the corporate mining interests they servePhantom maintains a love for his once-estranged grandson that finally redeems and releases him. Published in Australia in 2006, Wright's award-winning second novel (after "Plains of Promise") offers in Phantom one of the most compelling literary protagonists since Odysseus and will surely stand as a masterpiece of modern English-language literature.J.G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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