"...hundreds of wee bright insects, each the size of his little fingernail, metallic, iridescent and the discovery of them, the new light they brought to the scene, was a lightness in him - that was what surprised him - like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him, but was also exhilarating; for a moment he was entirely happy." [p97]

From REMEMBERING BABYLON by David Malouf, 1993.

#ReadtheWorld21

This was not an enjoyable read. To begin, the writing is not great. Malouf loves to embed several partly related clauses into one sentence, rather than write new ones (or just structure his sentences better). He also often describes things very abstractly so that it isn't obvious what he is talking about. Speaking of description, that is almost all the book is. There isn't that much to the story, but Malouf spends huge chunks of the book describing characters' mental lives, their history, their thoughts on others, etc. despite the fact that many of these characters are minor and the reader is given no reason to care about them. In fact, the reader is given little reason to care about many of the more major characters too.

The story itself was fine, and was the book's only redeeming quality. But, as I mentioned, it was bogged down so much in tedious description that it became a pain to read. Overall, not good.

David Malouf does not disappoint with his lyrical style of exposing the beauty of nature. And in juxtaposition, the ugliness of human nature. But there is hope! They are the little things like new green shoots that need nurturing care but yet sometimes the weight of the world can prove too much. It seems that David Malouf has this ability to draw you in to sympathise with his characters but then we are never really told what happened to them… All lives end; we are told that much of his characters’ lives but in between the ending of the tale and their deaths, it’s up to the readers’ interpretations. This story is told from multiple perspective though one or two dominates however they are told in such seamless progression that you’d rarely find with multiple perspectives novels, this was definitely a reflection of the master writer at work.

This book was pretty great. I enjoy historical fiction to a point and this was totally in my boundaries. Gemmy is amazing. My heart ached for him when we leared of his past. I love how janet, Meg and Lachlan brought him home and helped him. I love how they took him in and make him one of them. I didn't think that there was going to be anything interesting as I neared the end of the book. This is an awesome way of writing and I loved it.

This book was terribly boring. It had next to no plot, I couldn't identify with any of the characters, and it focused far too much on mundane incidents.

However, if you can get over the insane boringness and you appreciate literary novels where nothing much happens but it's set in this incredible era of mid-19th century Australia and there's all this racist talk, then maybe it's right up your alley.

I was the only person in my English class to even finish the damn thing.

The only reason it gets two stars is because I read it twice. It was just as boring the second time around.

A beautifully written and amazingly vivid portrait of early Australian colonisation

David Malouf has a beautiful writing style that is highly descriptive, evocative and conjures up amazing imagery for the readers. That is probably the strongest feeling I take away from this very good book. The story of Gemmy, Lachlan and others is a very interesting analysis of the fears, prejudice and isolation that existed in turn-of-the-century Australia. My only real negative regarding the book is the ending, which, while I mostly understood, some of it I found hard to appreciate what Malouf meant. Other than that, I have already bought a second Malouf book and would recommend Remembering Babylon.

Out of the darkness of the wild comes a boy…

The story gently sweeps along, weaving through a far-flung town’s hopes and fears as colonial and Aboriginal Australia uneasily coexist.

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
10 out of 10


This transcendent, mesmerizing, magnetic book could change the life of the reader, if only he or she is infused with the supernatural power, the ability to see from and to another world of the alien character Gemmy – alien in a brilliant manner, not alien in the manner that the American leader of this age is parachuted at the top of the free world, being at the same time unbelievably crooked, corrupt, disingenuous to such an extent that he seems to have landed from a mythical planet named Perversion – who is the ultimate X Man.

Remembering Babylon has been short listed for the Man Booker Prize in 1993 and is included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - and indeed, the Magnus opus is phenomenal, there are scenes in it that could be transformational, such as the one where the main character is visited by two Native people, Aborigines, since the story takes place at the antipodes , in Australia, and the communication between them is astonishing, for it does not seem to include many, if any words, but at the same time, the visitors have brought magic with them, a whole world, not within the stone that the vile Andy McKillop invents in his rendering of the ‘threatening’ apparition.
Gemmy Fairley appears suddenly in a community of white people, after spending a long time among Aborigines, where he becomes aware of things, visions, truths, dimensions that we appear to be unable to envisage, never mind comprehend, and when he arrives, he is met by Lachlan Beattie, who is in the company of his cousins, Janet and her sister, and when the stranger is close to the small group, a stick is pointed at him, as if it were a gun and therefore he utters “Do not shoot. I am a B-b-British object."

The stranger can hardly talk though and it is the pastor, Reverend Frazer that tries to take a testimony, making the reluctant teacher write it down, although the latter, rather upset of being told what to do and used, has fun inventing some words and changing what he writes, with a sardonic smile on his face when the reverend does not notice the changes…the stranger is taken in by the McIvor family, where cousin Lachlan is also a guest, all the way from England…
Alas, a conflict is generated between the unusual boy and the locals, who are afraid of the magic, the power that the natives have and the spirits or demons they can invoke, especially after the hero is visited by two Aborigines and the witness to the scene, a villainous, vicious man lies about the encounter, exaggerates and insists on the terrible danger that these people represent - if two just came to see him, twenty or more would soon come and bring in disaster – and the fact that they had brought him a ‘stone’

Andy McKillop does not even know himself how he managed to create such a story, but this ‘fake news’ and mostly the terror which the locals felt made them aggressive to the point where they start abusing the animals of the McIvor family, killing the three dear geese, which all had names and were friends of the young ones, then causing all manner of mischief, up to the point where they kidnap Gemmy and are ready to kill him and Jock McIvor is able to save him at the last moment, but they all realize that something has to give...
Some moments are exhilarating and transcendent, for the Aborigines have come to reclaim their own – ‘they spread the land before him…gave him its waters to drink and then he sees himself as a kind of imperial demiurge, out of mere rocks and air creating spaces were history may occur …he is at once the Hesiod of the place, its Solon and its antipodean Pericles…’

The wife of the Reverend Frazer speaks with women in the community and comes to the conclusion that something has to be done about the strange boy, who, although innocent and harmless, is still paradoxically dangerous, not because of something he might do – he would not be violent even unconsciously – but for reasons which have nothing to do with him…the locals are scared of what he represents, the unfamiliar, the threat of the Aborigines – whose land the white colonists have taken…there is a passage in which a killing of the natives is mentioned, when many decades later, Lachlan is looking for his childhood friend and he learns about the murder of innocent men, children, who had been in the possession of the land, until it was stolen from them
For a while, Gemmy would stay with Leona Gonzalez and Mrs. Hutchence, in a peculiar house, far enough from Barney and other neighbor of the McIvors and their violent ways, in a clean and bright room that counterintuitively scares the boy who has had a lot to suffer – earlier in his childhood he had been attached to a rat catcher who seemed to have abused him – and this is where Janet would become fascinated by bees, which at one point are very close to killing her, when a cloud of them comes and attach themselves to her body, but luckily, the girl had learned from Mrs. Hutchence that staying immobile is the ticket, albeit even this terrified teacher is breathless when the incident happens, yet another in a series of supernatural, out of body, otherworldly experiences so magnificently described by this marvelous author.

As he explains at the end – that is in the afterword – the author has based his glorious narrative on a real life event and the narrative of Gemmy, Lachlan and the other intriguing characters is more than fascinating…at times, they are hilarious as in the case of the man sent to create Queensland, to develop Brisbane – which has only a few thousand people at time of the story – where a crocodile went out on main street…

I thought this was a wonderful book - a poetic meditation on the power of language, fear, acceptance of difference and differing ways of looking at the world. It is beautiful and heart-breaking.

A 13 year old boy, put overboard because the crew fears that his illness is contagious, is taken in by Aborigines and learns their language and their way of being in the world. Sixteen years later he decides to join newly arrived white settlers. Instead of being welcomed, he is treated with great suspicion and fear by many in the group. He finds an unbridgeable gulf between most of them and himself, seen as a "white blackfeller".

(Pages 64-65) "But it was the other lot, those who were looking for the soft way, who gave him trouble. They could not understand why he was holding out on them. They were the peaceable ones, the ones who wanted to avoid bloodshed, couldn't he see that? Couldn't he tell the difference? Urgency made them desperate. They shouted at him, and then at one another.

And in fact a good deal of what they were after he could not have told, even if he had wanted to, for the simple reason that there were no words for it in their tongue; yet when, as sometimes happened, he fell back on the native word, the only one that could express it, their eyes went hard, as if the mere existence of a language they did not know was a provocation, a way of making them helpless. He did not intend it that way, but he too saw that it might be true. There was no way of existing in this land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that linked up all the various parts of it and made them one. Without that you were blind, you were deaf, as he had been, at first, in their world. You blundered about seeing holes where in fact strong spirits were at work that had to be placated, and if you knew how to call them up, could be helpful. Half of what ought to have been bright and full of the breath of life to you was shrouded in mist."

A very interesting contrast to "The Secret River" by Kate Grenville.

Previously read November 2013

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book. The writing is different, in a poemish read-between-the-lines kind of way. It was confusing. I wish I'd read the little write up first, it would have cleared up my confusion at the end.

It was an interesting book though,and kept my attention (when I did understand what I was reading)
the characters were interesting and real, flaws and all. I liked how it brought the world, in the time and that situation, alive

The most incredible thing about this book is how he captures the value of unspoken communication... The anger that dissipates when you sit next to each other, the feeling of someone the other side of the wall, the silent old woman who holds all that is happening, the aborigines who give and receive signs of acknowledgement, the ongoing impact of someone you haven't met in years.

What a difficult little book. I'm not sure what I would have made of this story had I not been familiar with Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic. Still, though high on intellectual delicacy, the narrative was a little low on nourishment. Is it possible for a writer to be too masterful to be interesting?