Malouf can write. His lyrical prose is stunning at times. I've heard many people talk about being forced to read this at school and it's odd because while I was reading the first half I kept putting myself in their shoes and thinking this is definitely the sort of book that well meaning teachers give to unenthused students in the hopes of stimulating discussion and challenging stereotypes but rather everyone just reads sparknotes and keeps the same opinion anyway. 


I thought Malouf handled the perspectives masterfully, the change in McIvor senior was probably the most interesting. Children always have that huge potential to believe and bend to anything. The bending of Jock, the subtle shift in his attitude and feeling towards his community is brilliant. It doesn't need to be huge, it's just the small seed of doubt that once planted grows until its roots wind around all your beliefs and change you completely. In contrast to Jock's change we see the seed of doubt of the rock changing the other men in the community into their basest selves.


I can't decide whether Malouf had elegantly danced around cultural appropriation by keeping the Aboriginal cultural material in the deep dark corners of the story or that was actually a deliberate recognition of Aboriginal culture and their sacred knowledge. Was it fear or courage that lead him to do that. I want to believe the latter. I've always been a big fan of description by omission.


The parallel between men's business and women's business in the Aboriginal community with the division between men and women's tasks in the settler community is brilliant. There's a comment from Lachlan that sums this up perfectly.


"It had struck him then, and for the first time, that there might be areas of experience that he was not intended to enter. That closed look marked only the closest and most gently guarded of them. Beyond lay others that had never heard of him and never would hear.


He was shaken. In the revelation that a power he had taken for granted in himself might have limitations, he felt much of it fall away." 


You could be forgiven for thinking this was about the Indigenous cultural knowledge not the knowledge women possess. That is the brilliance of Malouf's approach; he uses one duality to examine another by way of implicit analogy.


Xenophobia and fear as easily manipulated feelings are here in abundance and I think the frontier relations from early Australian colonial settlement are much closer to current race relations than we would like to believe. There is little to no understanding between the white community and the indigenous community. Countless times I've heard white people say, if they just tell us what they want, when will we ever stop saying sorry? etc. Equally there needs to be an understanding that we will never learn all there is to know of the aboriginal way of life because much of it is sacred and protected. Frankly, I prefer that to the proselytising of the Christian faith but I can see how in many ways it leads to aboriginal destruction, the aggressor believes he is right and feels no need to stop and understand something he's not allowed to know anyway.


In that sense this novel teaches respect. Respect not only for things we know but also for things we aren't allowed to know. We shouldn't fear the dark, we should accept it as part of our existence.

Frye write on W Blake: "In eternity one chooses the kind of time that accords with a creative mood, as Raphael explains to Adam in Paradise Lost: 'For we have also our evening and our morn- / We ours for change delectable, not need.'"

The writing is sentence perfect and beautiful, it’s like reading poetry. I listened to this as an audio and perhaps I was too distracted as I lost the thread and had to listen again to several sections. I think this is me not the story. Malouf is an exceptional writer so I will need to read this again to fully appreciate it. I think I struggled to hold all the characters in place as I’ve been attempting too much multi tasking (unsuccessfully).

One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast, three children were playing at the edge of a paddock when they saw something extraordinary. (from page 1)

And so the story begins…

The creature, almost upon them now…came to a halt, gave a kind of squawk, and leaping up onto the top rail of the fence, hung there, its arms outflung as if preparing for flight. Then the ragged mouth gapped. “Do not shoot,” it shouted “I am a B-b-british object!” (from page 3)

The “creature” is a white man (Gemmy) who had washed up on the Australian northern shore as a boy, and for 16 years lived among the aborigines who discovered him — these words are the first words of English he had spoken in many years, much of his native language has been lost from the lack of use. The white settlers who Gemmy subsequently found — he sought them out based on stories that he heard from the natives he lived with — reacted to his ‘being’ with natural suspicion. Naturally, the settlers wanted to know his origins, one question that was raised at the time of their initial scrutiny of this creature: Is he even a ‘white man’ anymore? Another question of greatest importance simmered in their minds: Could he be trusted? Would his staying on at the settlement cause the blacks (as the aboriginal people were referred to by the settlers) to raid their farms and do God knows what? The McIvor family who took in Gemmy out of kindness then became subject to the a suspicion — and of course, Gemmy falls victim to abuse because of incidents real or imagined and the McIvor’s receive their ‘punishment’ from their neighbors as well — and so it goes, a chronic story of persecution that has occurred for centuries from one society to another…

This book is written with tenderness — it is simply beautiful — quiet and intense, very much like ‘being there’—

A day of bushfires, brassy sky; the air stilled, smelling of char. Fine ash falling, as if the sun at last had burnt itself out and the last flakes of it were descending to cover the earth. It did not surprise him. He too felt burnt out, his skull a husk, paper-thin and rattling as he walked. He felt, as he followed the white ribbon that led to the settlement, 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.” (from page 176)

I’ve found yet another precious gem — detailing a history, a way of life or the raw, hard-scrabble attempt to create one with what you have available, and the way people communicate or simply can’t because of differences — differences terrify humans — if they ain’t like us, they must be up to no good — clearly, they ain’t right. Clearly. I could just about scream my eyeballs out sometimes because this ignorance and suspicion is so petty and disturbing — it seems so unnecessary to cause such torment from distrustful fabrications, but that’s what people do — they do it to ‘protect their own from the other’ and it’s something so ingrained in our nature I fear we can never shake it off even if we browbeat our children with diversity training in school and attempt to lead by example at home. Fear of ‘the other’ is wound around our sense of self-preservation, it is a tough strand to disentangle from our DNA no matter how enlightened we are — there will always be that nagging little itch of what if looking over the shoulder of the unsettled mind.

I discovered David Malouf on a bookstore sale table many years ago, the music of his words in The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) enchanted me and ever since, I have meant to read more by him, and finally, I’ve returned to his stories about Australia and look forward to filling my library with more books by this author.

REMEMBERING BABYLON exemplifies the very worst pitfalls of literary fiction. It is pretentious and boring. The mood is monochromatic. Worst of all, though it is ostensibly set in Australia's colonial past, it has no real sense of place. Instead, it exists in its own world - a nightmare realm that serves only as a stage for Malouf's stylistic onanism. Ironically, there is almost nothing quintessentially Australian about this book - no larrikin humour, no cynicism, no knowing sense of our tragicomic history. Instead we get something sickeningly sentimental, something quite foreign.

A phenomenal story about an unlikely incident that interrogates the construct of race in a novel way: What could it mean for a white man to be black and yet still be white? What could it mean for the man, and also the white and the black societies he inhabits? Surely it was a commentary on the echoes of colonialism and the race relations of its day (published in 1993) just as much as it remains those things for today.

Remembering Babylon was mentioned in Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, perhaps my favorite book on writing, so I had to read it. Craft-wise it's a worthy object to behold; the language is lauded for good reason--though Malouf has a tic with commas that becomes apparent over time--but the main players and the tension are what will stay with me. The novel is nearly without dialogue, and paying close attention to how Malouf constructed it yields some real insight on economy of dialogue and how characters are effectively drawn in its absence. Reading this, I was always ready for violence to break out, and always surprised when love did. It's worth it alone for the few descriptions we get of Gemmy's subjective, bizarre, mysticalised experiences of what it's like to transition from the society (and worldview) of the Aborigines to that of the white settlers, though the setup, conflict, and conclusion of the story are meat enough to satisfy most any reader. There are moments that true enough made my skin sizzle.

I seem to have a way of picking opaque books to read when I have a cold and under heavy meds. I would have thought it's the other way around if it was any other book, that the book was opaque because I was under medication, but apparently I'm not the only one. I just learned that Malouf is also a poet, and that's probably why for most of the book, every sentence made perfect sense, but together it meant nothing.

There are some rather beautiful parts. Janet with her body covered in bees, her mind zoning out and tapping into that of the bees. Ellen with her childhood spent in the coal mines of Scotland, longing for home. But beyond that, not much else. It wasn't cohesive, and there were too many underdeveloped characters. None were compelling. I guess it would have been an interesting look into early colonial Australia, had it had a good enough plot, but as it is, it was boring.

Absolutely mesmerizing. A novel that approaches race, liminality, love, language, home, and growing up with a keen eye. More to come.

UPDATE: I just read an article about David Malouf and the poetry of his prose, and it reminded me how much I loved this book.
5★
This book is impossible to categorise. It is certainly historical fiction—mid-nineteenth century setting—but it’s more a study than a story. The language is so rich and poetic, that I just wanted to read and enjoy every phrase.

When the British colonists (un)settled Australia, it was considered Terra Nullius, belonging to no one. A Scottish mother thinks,

“It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her—the absence of ghosts.

“Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath—a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were THEIR names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.

“They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.”

Now, of course, people are aware of the rich and ancient Aboriginal culture and the significance of Country and ancestors.

A truly lonely person is the central character, Gemmy Fairley, who belongs to nobody, nowhere.

He is an English street urchin—a rat-catcher’s small helper—who ends up on a ship as a plaything of the crew until they chuck him overboard. He washes up on a beach, where Aboriginal women help him and reluctantly allow him to tag along after them..

He is with them but not of them.

For the next 16 years, he soaks up their culture and loses what little he had of his own except for nightmares

When he sees white colonial families, he is intrigued, and one day, a group of children and their dog spot him watching them. The eldest boy swings his stick up to his shoulder like a rifle and challenges him. They all know it’s a stick, but the message is clear. This is ‘our’ land.

“The creature, almost upon them now and with Flash at its heels, came to a halt, gave a kind of squawk, and leaping up onto the top rail of the fence, hung there, its arms outflung as if preparing for flight. Then the ragged mouth gapped. ‘Do not shoot,’ it shouted. ‘I am a B-b-british object!’”

That is Gemmy’s life – forever precarious atop a boundary fence, almost unable to communicate, and at the mercy of all.

The story itself, takes place in the harsh, hot, humid climate, but the interest for me is the interior lives of the characters and how they manage to bump along together in spite of their differences. The characters are colourful and varied - the story is very real.

One thing that stood out for me was that although we hear little directly of the Aboriginal people, Gemmy’s knowledge of plants is invaluable to Mr. Frazer, the minister, who keeps a detailed field notebook and has dreams of using native plants and animals for the settlers. He records everything he can glean from Gemmy’s mangled language, and writes:

“We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous . . . It is habitable already.”

It’s a great story, which other reviewers have summarised well. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and anyone who has read Kate Grenville’s more recent novel The Secret River, or seen the television series, will have a sense of what the times were like near Sydney about the same time.

I don't remember ever having such difficulty at reading a short novel in my entire reading life. Reading Remembering Babylon was sadly a painful, exhausting and off-putting experience.

The narrative was tremendously hard to follow. Halfway through, I still had absolutely no idea about what was happening, or who was related to whom, or what sort of point was the author trying to make. I read this book carefully and through close reading, as it was a mandatory read for Uni; however, regardless of the level of attention and brainpower I invested while reading, I just didn't get it.

I couldn't shake the continuous feeling of utter confusion, not even after finishing and discussing the book in class. The multiple points of views and the in-depth development of most characters' background stories and their habits made the writing unbelievably convoluted. I also struggled with keeping up with the plodding pace and the lack of plot, as it seemed like nothing much was going on at all. Even after reaching the end, I kept wondering, what was the point? Still no idea.

Overall, Remembering Babylon it's not a story about Aboriginal people; in fact, it's everything but. I didn't enjoy the prose, the plot, or the characterisation. Unfortunately, not a book I can recommend.

At 200 pages this book at first seems too brief. Any concern about the page count is quickly blown away. David Malouf writes with very picturesque language. I found myself re-reading sections to fully absorb the imagery. At times I felt I could see, hear or smell as the characters did.

Remembering Babylon is a strange suffocating dream, a wave that washes over you with its words so gorgeous and lingering, yet never beautifully enough to cover the issues that haunt this novel(la?).

The story of a young boy - Gemmy - who is shipwrecked and finds himself amongst an Aboriginal tribe before going back to British settlers 16 years later, the novel purports to be based on a real story, that of James Morrill. In Remembering Babylon, Gemmy is an outcast, a pathetic figure pitied/feared by the settlers. Morrill however was somewhat of a minor celebrity, and used his knowledge of Aboriginal culture to help the settlers drive the Aboriginals away from their homeland. Malouf abandons this story in favour of casting Gemmy as a miserable outcast, which forces the settlers to examine their concept of whiteness. However this conflict feels more hinted at than an exploration.

In a way the novel is more concerned with the personal than the political, it is more about the settlers' relationships with each other and with Australia. Gemmy is more a catalyst than a fully formed person, and the characters here exist more as fragments that interact with each other in brief illuminating ways. Is it possible thought to write a novel solely about the personal when set in colonial times - a time defined more and more by the political? There is something unwordably wrong in my opinion about writing a novel set in colonial times about settlers without ever fully grasping the evil of colonisation, the stripping of identity and of generations. The settlers' fear of blackness haunts the novel, but Aboriginal people are never afforded a voice with which to confront that fear. The closest we get is Gemmy - a white boy transformed by his experience with Aboriginal people and rendered unable to communicate, except with a few intellectually elevated people.

Gemmy is liminality, sea and land, black and white, talking and silent. He is an aesthetic, and Remembering Babylon is ultimately a book about aesthetics, about imagery and emotion and the tangling of relationships. The colonisation of Australian disappears thus in this wash of imagery, the schoolmaster young and cynical, the menstruating girl set upon by bees who mistake her blood for honey in either a strange allegorical rape scene or a communion scene between her and the land, the biting of an apple to create connection. And this failure to grapple with colonialism in a more concrete way, and how Remembering Babylon prefers instead to leave colonialism as a spectre haunting the horizon, ultimately leaves this book less an exploration and illumination but more a shallow drawing of beauty that feels unbearably empty.