great source for settler anxiety, lack of attachment to land, doubt of their own civility/supremacy

Malouf is a great storyteller, and this story of a British boy thrown overboard off Australia, accepted partially into Aborigine society, and then stumbling back into white society is magical.

I liked the book, but I was very disappointed at the end. I chose to read this book because I was hoping it would give me an inside story about the Aborigines from a white man who had lived with them. Was I wrong!

I knew it was a story of a young white man (Gemmy Fairley) who had lived with the Aborigines or blacks as they were called, for 16 years. He was 10 or 12 when he was found on the shore, more dead than alive. They tended to him allowed him to live with them.

“He had been with them, quite happily it appeared, for more than half his life: living off the land, learning their lingo and all their secrets, all the abominations they went in for.”
He had some kind of mental handicap that was really never explained. He stuttered and had nightmares. He hopped around and played the fool most of the time.

“He was a parody of a white man. If you gave him a word for a thing, he could, after a good deal of huffing and blowing, repeat it, but the next time round you had to teach it to him all over again.”

One day he appeared out of the forest to three white children. The white settlers were always leery of him and felt that he was skulking around and spying on them so that he could go back and tell the blacks things. Then, he disappeared one day. The story then jumped ahead 15 years and it was indicated that Gemmy had been killed, along with some other blacks. Then it jumped again and was 50 years later and two of the white children who had originally found Gemmy at the beginning of the story had a meeting. Weird.

The story started off great, and there were more than a few references to the Aborigines but no more than a glimpse. What I learned was that the English settlers were terrified of the blacks and lived in constant fear of being attacked. They never tried to understand them or comprehend what they wanted when they came around. There was only one white man interested discovering the plants and trees and vegetation to report back to the Governor of the colony and his text was never taken seriously. It was Gemmy that showed him around and pointed out fruits and vegetation that was good to eat. Mr. Frazer made meticulous drawings and notes. Gemmy was fascinated watching him. He believed that Mr. Frazer had captured the spirit of what he had been shown.

There were parts of the story that are very good, descriptive and sensitive. Most of the characters are so-so. The author writes things and gives no reasons or examples and you are just left to say to yourself "okay - that was strange".

I got to chapter 19 and it was like - where did the rest of the story go??? And - what - did everyone fall asleep and wake up 30 years later during WWI?

So much for a book short listed for the Booker Prize!

Although this high quality novel is set in the mid 19th century, I wouldn't really describe it as a "historical novel". It has a dreamlike feel and is probably closer to the magic realism genre. The setting is Queensland, amongst a group of English and Scottish families living at the very outer edge of European settlement. Beyond the settlement there is a vast, unknown and frightening "otherness", and the novel's central event is the arrival in the settlement of a near naked white man, speaking an Aboriginal language and seemingly sprung from the landscape itself, but holding onto a few ragged remnants of his former clothing as a badge of his previous existence. This is "Gemmy", one time ship's cabin boy, marooned years previously and adopted by the local Aboriginal people.

This is one of those novels that has little in the way of a conventional storyline. Gemmy is taken in by one of the local families, but with his arrival little cracks of dissension start to appear in the community. The novel minutely observes the shifts in relationship that develop as a result. I would say that this novel is mainly about identity, both group and individual, and about each person's place in the world. Definitely not one to read if you are looking for edge of the seat action, but it kept me intrigued throughout.

3.5 ||

ouch :(

this was for uni! i wished i had a physical copy and also didn’t feel the need to rush through because it was so so beautiful my poor heart hurts :( here’s to surviving its final exam

actual rtc if i wasn’t lazy

voi jeesus kun tää oli niiiin tylsä, ärsyttävää tekstiä kun ihan järkyttävän pitkiä lauseita missä on miljoona sivulausetta että ei edes muista mistä siinä puhuttiin alussa

Here, as has occurred so many times elsewhere, mid-nineteenth century Europeans are faced with a complex indigenous culture whose very existence they cannot imagine, let alone comprehend. Unsettled by what they observe, they take refuge in a firm belief in their own race, their confidence bolstered by the knowledge of their more advanced weaponry and means of transportation. Unable to deal with an aboriginal culture in any logical way, their only options remain to either tolerate it in a constant state of anxiety or obliterate it in some manner. Such a premise is unlikely to make for an engaging read.
This book is dominated by the undercurrents, the muttering that takes place within people as they stumble along. The daily reality of their physical existence in an environment they find harsh and brutal grinds them down physically, while their awareness of events is often pushed back from their conscious thought, taken over by the undertone — the babel — that rules them from within.
Malouf has chosen, appropriately I suppose, to write this novel in a somewhat Victorian style: dense prose, stifling atmosphere, nineteenth century themes and attitudes of the characters. Regrettably, none of that worked for me; almost everything done here was done better by Dickens in his own day. I find myself starkly at odds with almost every other reviewer.

Moving. A lovingly written, poetically realzed novel about a shipwrecked boy growing up in the wilds of Australia who is taken into civilized British Colonial Society and suffers the exile and the torment of the clash of his identity.

Malouf is a poet, apparently a good one, and his prose is mild but incandescently so. It glows and he controls the tint as the story fits.

Very sad, very humble and moving. This is feeling of millions of people around the globe who find themselves somewhere between the borderlines of what is built for people and what is not.

The distance he keeps his characters from each other and the distance he keeps the reader from the action is marvelously balanced. It's this balance that drives a moral fable about colonized people and the influence of the Other in social change to true depth and simple purity.

It's on a bunch of curriculums, apparently, and it totally deserves to be.

A white man of aboriginal Australian dress and manner races to the fence surrounding a marginal British colony on the coast in the late 19th century. He climbs the fence, perches and balances in this liminal space, and tumbles back into civilization, changing the lives of the children that watch it all happen.

The man was once a British subject, a child pressed into virtual slave labor on the high seas. He survives a shipwreck and spends the next 15 or so years living amongst the Aborigines. The colonists don't know what to do with him — can he be trusted?

An intriguing set up, ready for action, but the novel unfolds in strange ways. Malouf is far more interested in the interior lives of the British colonists than he is in Gemmy, the Brit gone native. And Gemmy is strangely infantilized (he scarcely remembers any English despite having lived his first 13 years in the place) which severely limits the depth of his character. I read a bit about the real-life fellow that he was based on, and others like him who had spent 10+ years in aboriginal communities, and I feel like their stories were a lot more interesting than what we get out of Gemmy. We learn so little about his life with the Aborigines, and only scattered half-memories of his life before that, pure trauma as an English street urchin.

Instead we get unexpected focuses on the little girl that becomes a celebrated bee scientist, the local teacher and minister, the big farm boy with the cleft lip who enjoys flirting at tea with a young woman far out of his league. The book is kaleidoscopic, shifting perspectives and sympathies between the various characters of the colony. This stuff is pretty good! But Gemmy's story fizzles out - in the end, Malouf is only really interested in how Gemmy provoked a reaction in the British, and how it changed certain individuals.

The writing is really terrific. But maybe this is too middle- or lowbrow of me, but I wanted a more satisfying narrative. I wanted Gemmy to have an arc and a history. I wanted some depth to the culture clash. But Malouf seems to be attracted to stuff that's beside the point. The novel closes far into the future. Gemmy's story remains obscure. But the children who saw him on that fence, who have gone on to do so many things, are still chewing over their memories of the event. It's an artsy and unsatisfying perspective, perhaps intentionally so, like an art house movie.

One of the most astonishing pieces of Australian writing I have ever read. It's no secret that Malouf is one of our national treasures, but Remembering Babylon is something else entirely. Written from a dozen or so perspectives, each absorbing in its accuracy, Malouf turns his eye in this short novel to the complexities of colonialism, specifically among white, rural Australians in the 1860s. Less than a century after the country was colonised, a small town (village?) of white people struggle with the introduction amongst them of a white man who has been living with Indigenous people for 16 years. Their concern about whether he has completely lost "it", their fear of the unknown - anything beyond view of their steeple - and that uncomfortable, uneasy relationship with their own colonialism, their sense of inferiority to the mother country, and the social and cultural clashes between neighbours that have made up every society since time immemorial... all captured in fewer than 200 pages.

Malouf smartly chooses not to write from the Indigenous perspective - he has rightly said that no white person in Australia can really do that - but gives us enough touches through Gemmy's point of view that we understand the true tragedy of colonialism, as symbolised through Janet's relationship with her bees. Being able to see them communicate but not quite understand how, and wondering if you knew it once, is a thought that has often haunted me, and remains haunting.

By 1860, my ancestors were well settled in Australia, their children becoming young adults and soon to have children of their own. My relationship with this land - as a white, rural-born, gay, intellectual, urbanite - is a complex one, and so is my relationship with the attempted genocide my ancestors perpetuated. Although the killing ended long ago, the cultural suppression continued well into the 1960s - the decade of my parents' birth - and we live with a lineage of divided privilege, culture, and sentiment. Compared to our neighbours "across the pond", New Zealand, who charted a very different 19th century, it is very telling.

To return to Malouf's work, his prose is tight, almost silhouetting the situations that occur, using the characters' summations of moments and often sidestepping detail, to leave us caught in the shadow between the people involved. It's a strange, sometimes surprisingly synopsis-like approach to writing, and yet it somehow produces a staggering effect. This is a quintessential Australian novel, one that examines our tortured history without unfairly chastising. The relationship between white and black is one key theme, but so is the relationship between home and away. Even now in 2018, the so-called "cultural cringe" remains strong in Australia. We have a fractious relationship with the UK, and within ourselves about the UK - the proximity to "the world", the lengthy history and culture, the feeling that we have been distanced from so much cultural understanding through the fault of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. We often discuss this in the context of Australia's newer migrant families, but I can attest it remains strong in an eighth-generation Australian like myself. To peer into the minds of people who themselves remember the mother country, or - even worse - have heard it from everyone around them but are themselves inexperienced, is a gift in the hands of Malouf.

Perhaps this is a work about questions, not about answers. The answers are for us to find - if, indeed, we ever can.

Mä luulen, että jos mulla olisi ollut enemmän aikaa lukea tätä, oisin ehkä jopa tykännykki tästä. Nyt jo jotkut lauseet oli todella kauniita ja oisin mielelläni pohtinu niitä lisää, mutta rehellisesti en ymmärtäny kaikkea tarpeeksi. Kaikki rakkaus Janetille silti <3

Somewhere, deep down inside, in everybody is hidden a memory of Babel, when all the nations were one.
“So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” Genesis 11:8-9
By confounding language and destroying the tower God had sown enmity among peoples...
Remembering Babylon is a very idiosyncratic novel about communicating and cognizance. Even the closest relatives often fail to understand each other. And even the best intentions are so often misunderstood… What obstacles stand in the way of mutual understanding?

He walked swiftly now over the charred earth and was himself crumbling. If he did not find the word soon that would let him enter here, there would be nothing left of him but a ghost of heat, a whiff as he passed of fallen ash.

All we need is a right word…
But “Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,” – William Blake: The Four Zoas.