![]() ![]() That’s you Oblivion!’ Mother Nature, swans, the swamp, and three humans – girl, woman, elder – form the heart of this extraordinary novel, which is set 100 years from the present in a world that has been ravaged by climate change and the wars over land that broke out in its wake. The first chapter, ‘Dust Cycle’, introduces Mother Nature – or ‘the Mother Catastrophe of flood, fire, drought and blizzard’ – and reintroduces the prologue’s narrator with an equation: ‘Ignis Fatuus = Foolish Fire. Two more strangers appear at the swamp: a lone black swan, the first ever seen on this country, and an Aboriginal elder who looks like Mick Jagger and comes to heal the country from dust and drought. Fenced off from the rest of Australia by the Army, its traditional custodians left destitute, the swamp has become ‘the world’s most unknown detention camp’ for Indigenous Australians. ![]() There she fills Oblivia’s head with stories of swans. Bella Donna takes Oblivia (as she is known) to live with her on an old warship in a polluted dry swamp, inundated with dust. She eventually ‘invades’ northern Australia. She has escaped her devastated country in the northern hemisphere, where ‘whole herds of deer were left standing like statues of yellow ice while blizzards stormed’. The woman, Bella Donna of the Champions, is a refugee from climate change wars. The central character of this multilayered novel is a mute teenage girl, who is named Oblivion Ethyl(ene) by an old woman who finds her deep in the bowels of a gum tree. The Swan Book suggests that stories, their dissemination and cross-pollination, bear upon the ability of Indigenous Australians to govern their own minds, and by extension their land (these are inextricably linked) – and that this has implications for the future of human life on Earth. She is concerned with the human mind and its capacity to imagine, with the way stories are born from particular locales and yet can spread like viruses, travelling gypsy-like across the planet in the way of migratory birds, taking hold of minds in places they don’t belong. In this surreal prelude, Wright introduces the basic elements of her unlikely love story about a girl’s affair with the northern skies and her quest to regain sovereignty over her own brain. It is ‘nostalgia for foreign things’ and it manufactures dangerous ideas, including a ‘splattering of truths’ about ‘a story about a swan with a bone’. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. ![]() Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll’s house. The novel opens with an arresting declaration: It teems with songs, stories, images and fragments of culture from across the planet. In August 2008, as part of her Oodgeroo Noonuccal Lecture, Wright said: ‘Oodgeroo absolutely understood the power of belief in the fight for sovereignty over this land – that if you could succeed in keeping the basic architecture of how you think, then you owned the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive.’ The Swan Book constructs this architecture of the mind – and, as with a mind, it operates in many dimensions simultaneously. But The Swan Book takes all these – especially the last – to new levels. It bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin her humour and scathing satire her fierce political purpose her genre bending her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic. The Swan Book is Alexis Wright’s third novel and like her first two – Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award winning Carpentaria (2006) – it opens in her ancestral country, the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria. But not for the reasons you might imagine. This is the saddest love story I have ever read. ![]()
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