Devilish in Tasmania
A brilliant debut sets a metaphysical detective story on Oz’s southern isle.
Is this novel surreal? Is it mythopoeic? Is it magical realism? Is it satire? Or is it one big prose poem? Slippery as a new-caught fish, elusive as a drifting cloud, it is all of these things in part and none of them in total. At the very least, as the debut novel of a young Australian still in his twenties, Flames is brilliant. But you have to watch your step when reading it. Its narrative voice keeps changing. It defies chronological order, doubling back on itself in unexpected ways and revisiting, from different perspectives, episodes we thought were over.
Strip it down to its crude narrative essence and it is a chase story, albeit a very offbeat one. In Tasmania, Levi McAllister is searching for his sister Charlotte, who has gone missing in mysterious circumstances. We know, but Levi doesn’t, that she has fled to a hiding place in the most remote and isolated corner of south-west Tasmania. Levi hires a hard-drinking, tough, no-nonsense private detective to find her and the chase is on.
Straightforward, right? Except that from the opening pages, we know Levi is making a coffin for his sister to keep her buried once she dies, because deceased women in the family have the disconcerting habit of being reincarnated as trees and communicating with the living. Likewise, the opening pages introduce us to a fisherman who catches “Oneblood” – very large tuna – with the psychic help of a New Zealand fur seal.
Nothing is as it seems. A water rat appears as a river god and gives us a history of the impact of human beings upon Tasmania. Fire is personified and expresses motives for ripping at nature and burning off acres of grassland. Women weep flames and the tough private detective is not what we first think. T he overarching theme appears to be the way unappreciated forces of nature can still assert themselves. The close, detailed and very colourful evocations of fish, wombats, water rats, rough seas, dripping rainforest and mountains could be read as promotion of ecological awareness or something nebulous like “the oneness of nature”. But Robbie Arnott is aware that raw nature is not always pretty and is often red in tooth and claw. Orcas rip apart fur seals. Angry cormorants mutilate wombats.
And there are those human beings, too, which is where the satire comes in. Arnott plays with gender stereotypes in the way his human characters connect, fight, threaten or bond with one another. Yet all the while he implies that such interaction is a small thing in comparison with humanity’s place in nature as a whole.
You could read Flames as an incitement to get a sense of perspective. Or, like me, you could enjoy it for its prose poetry, its vivid imagery, its brilliant turns of phrase on nearly every page.
FLAMES, by Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing, $37)