In Remembering Babylon, Australian author David Malouf has written a lyrical poignant book that examines large themes such as colonialism and prejudice, situating them in human vulnerability, insecurity, and fear of the unknown. It is a novel in which spare luminous prose evokes distances, light, and shadow - both in the world around us and within us. Based on a true story - a shipwrecked white child raised by an Aboriginal clan in North Queensland and then discovered by a rural White community - Malouf weaves poetry and magic in his gorgeous story, infused with the deep connections to nature which is inherent in Aboriginal spirituality. Five stars wasn’t enough!

There are no words.

Malouf appears to be a lyrical master, who produces nothing but beauty with every stroke of a pen. Indeed, as he writes toward the end of this spectacularly moving novel, 'he was tying up one of the loose ends of his life, which might otherwise have gone on bleeding forever'. There is the very real sense that Malouf, in this novel and many of his others, is not just grappling with the questions that individually experienced traumas can inflict, but with the greater questions of our nationally developed identity; what we take from our collective history to form our sense of who we are, and those things that we might purposefully ignore because they don't support the picture we have painted of ourselves. From Gemmy, Lachlan, Janet, Ellen, George Abbott, Mr Frazer and Jock we learn that it is possible to move forward - however changed we may be from what came before - and continue to live, even though return is impossible. Return is impossible for these characters as their experiences and involvement with each other have forever changed who they were and how they understand the world they live in and the people around them. They have clarity. A lesson we could all stand to learn.

I read this book over ten years ago and was struck by the beautiful writing. This year I taught it to a (very advanced) 12th grade class and left it with the feeling that it is an underappreciated masterpiece. The writing is, as stated, exquisite, but the characterization is also exceptional as Malouf shows how the people in this settlement react to the presence of a man who provokes both fascination and fear. Read this one slowly and take the time to reflect on it. I also greatly appreciated how capably Malouf depicted the female characters, the sensitivity with which he treats the Aboriginal culture, and the sympathy he had for all of his characters, as he shows that each person has the ability to evolve and flourish, if they can only open themselves up to a greater appreciation of their neighbors and surroundings.

3'75

The story explores the hostilities, mistrust and uncertainties of interactions between early British settlers in Australia and native Aborigines through the eyes of a character whose circumstances prevent him fitting comfortably in either category. Beautifully written and emotionally charged- some passages that will stay with me for their tenderness, some for their shocking brutality. There are moments of real humour and wonderful evocations of the landscape both actual and psychological. Reflects upon issues of race, intolerance, fear, the unifying but also ostracising capacity of language and upon the nature and fragility of belonging.


"She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller- even that would be a comfort- than the one she was bound to."

"He did not like the experience, which was new, of seeing his friends from a distance, of finding them on one side and himself on the other, and the knowledge that if he was seeing them with new eyes, he too, since the distance must work both ways, had become an object of scrutiny. He was disturbed, most of all, by the view that gave him of himself."

"It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable self, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there wasa place out there where the self mights stand alone."

"He felt... that he had lost all weight in the world; his feet made so little impression in the dust that it was as if he had not passed or had passed through into another being and no longer shared- with the powdery dust under his feet, the rocks, the trees along the way where he paused a moment to rest and, settling his palm against a tree trunk, felt the sap streaming up from where the giant tree was rooted- the hold these things had on the earth."

"What a thing Love is, she thought. And that was the word on her lips, though she did not speak it. Love. What she said was 'Lachlan' and took his large paw in her equally scabbed and freckled one."

"The story already had elements in common with others he had heard up here, which when he tried to track them down had proved elusive. Perhaps they were all one story. Whether this one had happened, as the woman claimed, six years ago in her own lifetime, or in her Mother's, or last year, it had been gathered now into the dreamtime of the land itself, a shadowy realm where the bones of facts had already drawn around them the skin of rocks, of beasts, of air."

"It pleased her to let her mind drift so far, then further- out over the muddy, stinking flats towards the waters of the bay, which were not visible yet, but approaching. Her mind, even as it entered the ravaged yards, the shacks, the heads of sleeping children who were forbidden for the time being to visit but who would come back when all this nonsense was over, the jaws of silkworms softly spinning, was at the same time stilled, dreamily attendant, beyond tinted glass, to the life of the hive, moving closer now to the spirit of it, to the language they were using, those angelic creatures in their world of pure geometry, of circles, half-circles, hexagons, figures of eight. When she glances up again, for she has been dozing, the misty blue out there has become indigo; the first lights have been doused, though the houses themselves do not fade from her mind, or the children who are sleeping in them. The first bright line of moonlight has appeared out on the mudflats, marking the ever moving, ever approaching, ever receding shore. All of this is a kind of praying... love, again love- overbalanced but not falling... All these Lord, all these. Let none be in the dark or out of mind, on this night, now, in this corner of the world or any other, at this hour, in the middle of this war..."

"He had turned his gaze from her and was looking, very intently, at a little flower that he must have plucked as they walked, which grew on a bush that was very common here- they were standing in an unruly tide of it; a kind of peaflower, very satiny white and small, which it would have been easy to miss. It was the way he held it, the grace of the bit of a thing in his rough hand, and the attention he gave it, that touched here and made its whiteness come alive. When she looked round the whole slope was shining with it."

"It was transformed, made unfamiliar by moonlight and the tinking of night-creatures... She stood without breathing, or so it seemed, and the calm she felt, which was all suspense of ordinary, daytime feeling, had to do with the tense and brittle strangeness with which the world was touched.."

"But what his stilled blood saw was the bird's beak drawing long silver threads out of the heart of the water, which was all a tangle of threads, bunched or running; and his boots had no weight, neither did his hand with the half-bitten lump of bread in it, nor his heart, and he was filled with the most intense and easy pleasure: in the way the air stirred the leaves overhead and each leaf had attached itself to a twig, and whirled yet kept hold; and in the layered feathers that made up the grey of the bird's head; and at how long the threads of water must be to run so easily from where they had come from to wherever it was, imaginably out of sight, that they were going- tangling and untangling and running free. And this time too the intense pleasure had a disturbing side. The things he had begun to be aware of, however fresh and innocent, lay outside what was common, or so he thought; certainly, since he could have found no form in which to communicate them, outside words."

Not even the high praise accorded David Malouf's Remembering Babylon can approximate the audacious pomposity with which it insists upon itself. Whole chapters are spent telling in long, fractured sentences more laden with commas than coherence the characters' backstories, their habits, the minutiae of their days as if this alone is enough to create a compelling read. Every second chapter breaks narrative - if there still is one at midway through the novel - to explain again how lonely Mrs. McIvor feels or some other such thing that could have easily been shown through actual character development.

Somewhere in all this nonsense is a story. Gemmy is a white man who appears in a white settlement looking, sounding and acting like an indigenous Australian. The opportunity for drama is tantalizing. Malouf refuses in the longest and drabbest way possible to pay it out. Over half the novel is spent before a follow-up event takes place. Remembering Babylon seems to fall victim to the belief that simple people doing simple things is interesting enough so long as those simple people and things represent the sanitized view of the settlement of White Australia. It's a cultural arrogance that is prevalent in our writers of all media.

Malouf is not undeserving of praise. He commands language like a true poet and had Remembering Babylon been a poem instead of what should be a narrative series of events the hype wouldn't feel so misplaced. But as it is, Remembering Babylon fails at both.

This is a great novel, a genuine classic.

David Malouf is one of those writers whose work leaves me speechless with admiration. I have sought out his writings since reading his short story Southern Skies in anthology. That he has wonderful Australian voice goes without saying, he immediately comes across as unique and different but also universal. His writing moves me in totally unexpected ways. He is a great writer and someone you need to read, either this or one of his other amazing novels.

"It does not make a house any less vivid out there because she can no longer see its light; or the children any less close because they no longer come to visit; or Willie because she has never known him except for what she has felt in Lachlan, and through him, in herself, the wedge of apple in his mouth; or her mother, long gone, standing out on the hillslope in the dark, the dark of her body solid through the flimsy stuff, the moonlight, of her shift; or her father slumped at the breakfast table, the loose skin of her mother's hand, like an old glove, on the leathery back of his neck..."

I got this book from an op shop in West End.

It’s a gorgeously written first contact story, only with a white-black man - the real blacks painted more as perceptions than characters.

I don’t usually take down long quotes from novels, but some tracts of beautiful prose I want to capture here in order to remember the luminescence of this story more than any summary I could give it.

It follows Gemmy, a scarecrow man, an orphan cast overboard from a ship at 13. Washed ashore and barely alive, Gemmy lives with Aboriginal people for 16 years…

“The mob of naked women and gleaming, big-eyed children who found him washed up at low tide in their bay. What was it? A sea-creature of a kind they had never seen before from the depths beyond the reefs? A spirit, a feeble one, come back from the dead and only half reborn? The flesh was raw, covered with white flower-like ulcers where the salt had got in, opening mouths that as the soft water touched them lifted pale tentacles.”

Gemmy’s story is symbolic of course, like a fable, that the book itself preempts.

“In time his coming among them became another tale they told and he would listen to it with a kind of wonder, as if what they were recounting had happened ages ago, in a time beyond all memory, and to someone else. How, when they found him he had still been half-child, half sea-calf, his hair swarming with spirits in the shape of tiny phosphorescent crabs, his mouth stopped with coral; how, ash-pale and ghostly in his little white shirt, that long ago had rotted like a caul, he had risen up in the firelight and danced, and changed before their eyes from a sea-creature into a skinny human child.”

It has a heart of darkness foreboding, the fear of the unknown, of the frightening horror of what the blacks in the interior might do, and the unwelcome reminder of this Gemmy brings. Needless to say, the true heart of darkness lies within the new community itself.

“You had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It.
For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then?“

“Of course, it wasn’t him you were scared of. He was harmless, or so they said, and so you preferred to believe. It was the thought that next time it might not be him. That when you started and looked up, expecting the silly smile, what would hit you would be the edge of an axe. He made real what till now had been no more than the fearful shape of rumour, though the rumour lately had had a name and number to it: Comet River, nineteen souls.”

The spirit of the country breathes through the novel in some of its most beautiful writing. It speaks to Gemmy in a language he comes to realise is invisible to other white people.

“He was moving through a world that was alive for him and dazzling; some of it even in the deepest shade throwing off luminous flares, so that he had to squint and cover his eyes, and all of it crackling and creaking and swelling and bursting with growth; but he cast the light only in patches for Mr Fraser, leaving the rest undisclosed”

Some white men metamorphose and see it too.

“Wading through waist-high grass, he was surprised to see all the tips beaded with green, as if some new growth had come into the world that till now he had never seen or heard of. When he looked closer it was hundreds of wee bright insects, metallic, iridescent, and the discovery of them, the new light they brought to the scene, was a lightness in him - like a form of knowledge he had broken through to.”

Finally a garden of eden appeal about the fruits we don’t know we had, had ignored, lost, but could learn to rebirth.

“Did we not, long ago, did not our distant ancestors, bring in out of the great plains where they wandered, out of mere wilderness, the old coarse grasses that lapped the bellies of their horses, and, separating the grains and nursing them to plumpness, learning how to mill and grind and make daily bread, and how to tend the wild vine till its fruit yielded wine… All this can be done again. This is what is intended by our coming here: to make this place too part of the world’s garden, but by changing ourselves rather than it.”

A strange and descriptive book, about the impact of the arrival of a man who has lived amongst aborigines for many years. Gemmy is a very damaged character. It stemmed from his horrific treatment before being tossed overboard from a ship. There are a lot of unanswered questions arising from this book.

One of the best books I’ve read this year. The writing is beautiful but not overdone, and the amazing prose suits the simplicity of the plot while complimenting the hidden complexity of the themes. I found myself having to reread or read out loud many passages to make sure I’m catching everything