Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright

Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, is a loosely edited 528-page collection of anecdotes about quirky characters living in a podunk town in tropical Northern Australia, also a harrowing tale of racialised violence, first published in 2006. In this review, I will argue that the strength of Carpentaria is that it plays fast and loose with conventional narrative structures, escaping the confines of modern Western storytelling. I will then reveal this argument to be a bait-and-switch and subsequently drive the review into a wall.

Hero’s journey bad

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, was a piece of speculative anthropology published around the middle of the last century. Campbell claimed to have recognised a recurring structure in human storytelling: there is a hero, the hero answers a call to some sort of a quest, receives supernatural aid, passes a threshold to an upside-down world, reaches a nadir where all hope is lost, then finally prevails and returns to our world to reap his just rewards. As Borges and Mr Plinkett note, Campbell’s tropes are extensively repackaged in modern storytelling. We recognise them in the adventures of Neo, Luke Skywalker, Sarah Connor, Indiana Jones, Katniss Everdeen, and Harry Potter, to just name a few. These stories all use a narrative arc to connect with their audience and call back to the kinds of stories our ancestors used to tell around a campfire after nightfall. Except they didn’t and they don’t.

In a 2004 lecture, Kurt Vonnegut takes a gander at a heap of Native American legends and shows that none of them really conforms to anything like the hero’s journey, and, in fact, appear nonsensical if you are looking for one. I don’t really have the cultural capital to talk about Native American mythology, but I’m happy to point the reader to the foundational texts of Western culture, none of which have proper heroes and journeys either. Take the Odyssey. The picturebook adventures of cunning Odysseus take place in four books (9-12), out of 24. The rest of the epic poem is about the etiquette of hosting and visiting dinner parties. The text takes this utterly seriously, going into minute details regarding the number and size of bronze cauldrons the host should gift to the guest, depending on the guest’s relative rank and the duration of their stay. Most of the picturebook adventures themselves are about the dos and don’ts of house calls: be polite, do not take stuff without asking first, and so on. The focal conflict is about guests who stay overlong (20 years), act inappropriately (try to marry the hostess), and what you should do about them (kill them all).

The English foundational epic, Beowulf, sort of follows a hero on a sort of journey, if you squint, but it is also very off, with an inordinate emphasis on kinship, patronage networks, and, again, the customs of gift giving. While the hero Beowulf defeats the dragon at the end, the poem leaves us with his body burning on a pyre and his achievements amounting to nothing. The most left-of-field of all national epics, though, is Finland’s Kalevala. Compiled and heavily edited by a guy in the great 19th century flourish of Finnish nationalism, the text is still very much based on a patchwork of pre-existing Finnish and Karelian oral traditions. And it shows. The story is mostly about the ancient god-hero-shaman-witch-doctor-person Väinämöinen and his mad lads who walk around the village and talk to each other a lot. Even when, occasionally, a group of characters find their bearings long enough to converge on some sort of a plot point, more often than not they won’t even leave the village because someone comes out of their hut and starts talking to them and then they end up in a neverending verbal standoff. Everybody talks a lot in Kalevala and does little else, and the main methods of conflict resolution are these unending dialogues of boasts, taunts, insults, and riddles. Not many conflicts are resolved.

Beware of a silent man and still water

People also talk a lot in Carpentaria. Mostly to themselves. We ride shotgun with an omniscient narrator gliding from skull to skull, sometimes dipping in only for a thought or two, sometimes spending an entire, lengthy, chapter with a character and whatever it is they are on about. The main setting is the claustrophobic mining town of Desperance, the sort of place where everybody thinks they know everything about everybody, and people rarely go round to hone in their existing presuppositions. In a reversal of historical fortunes, it is the Aboriginal populace who mostly get a voice in the novel, while our impressions of what the Anglos might be thinking comes through, if at all, in a distorted staccato. When we get to spend more time in the heads of some white residents, they tend to be the outsiders of the outsiders, like the Irish priest, or the deranged Captain Finn, who took invasion to a logical extreme by wearing an old Australian army uniform day in day out, or even the Southern police commissioner, the tough “valley cop”, who moved north for a change of climate and probably ended up with more than he bargained for. (The valley here is a likely reference to Fortitude Valley, Brisbane’s now largely gentrified but still, at times, charmingly terrifying entertainment district, NE of the CBD.)

The main actors are numerous enough and have enough on their plates to distract you from missing out on some quality white middle class Australian anxiety. The novel shines here, effortlessly pulling up a series of eternal, larger than life characters, with very distinct voices, who all have a lot to share. I couldn’t help but think that, though some of them veered on the implausible, they were all likely based on actual real people that the author knew from here and there. What plot there is would either be brought up in oblique references or hidden in terse paragraphs that go off like landmines in the fields of whoever it is that is speaking and whatever it is they are speaking about. The novel mainly consists of the unending, reflective monologues of its epic Shakespearean cartoon characters.

This pantheon is sandwiched between the only way you should start a book (the World Serpent creates Northern Queensland) and the only way you should end it (everything blows up). We start with the extraordinarily named Normal Phantom, patriarch, village elder, and gang leader of Desperance, all roles forced upon him by other people, roles that he performs with very little relish, except perhaps being the head of a large family, though even here it is clear that fishing as much as he wants takes a priority. And make no mistake, fishing in this novel is a life or death affair. Then we meet his wife, Angel Day, who the Australians I know would, with characteristic understatement, describe as a handful, Joseph Midnight, his local arch rival, if this makes any sense whatsoever in this context, and it really doesn’t, the local spiritual leader Mozzie Fishman (and being a local spiritual leader is, in this book, more serious business than fishing, even), and, finally, Elias Smith, the nameless, messianistic Odysseus of the town of Desperance, who is all the more enigmatic because he spends most of the novel in an amnesiac fugue or stone cold dead.

We learn through them about the happenings. People die, things explode on an impressively large scale, and the conclusion sees the entire town razed to the ground, garnering little sympathy from the reader (unless they are a civic engineer). A point is made here, in the mighty shadow of the World Serpent, about how all the actual events in the book, horrible, unjust, and bloodcurdling as they are, take a subordinate role to the landscape and the voices that bring it to life for us – not the least the narrator’s.

The paleoclimatology of Northern Queensland

The Dreamtime is a term coined by the Australian amateur anthropologist Francis Gillen. It is sort of tricky to write a book review of Carpentaria without bringing it up. In the most reductive, utilitarian terms possible, the Dreamtime is a collection of Aboriginal narratives about the ancestors who traversed and created the landscape, which is the same thing. It has been used by the preliterate native societies of Australia to store information accumulated in cultural evolution. Here’s the thing: even nice parts of Australia can be quite difficult to survive in if you don’t have knowledge, accumulated over millennia, on how to do it. The funny thing is, Invaders saw native Australians as innocent children of a virgin land at best (make of that what you will) and subhuman idiots at worst, and yet had a much worse initial track record of staying alive in the lands they were trying to take over.

In his book The Secret of Our Success, Joe Henrich relishes in describing the great doomed expeditions of the Victorian era, including the Burke and Willis group trying, in 1860, to cross Australia from Melbourne to (here we go again) the Gulf of Carpentaria. The expedition members were all highly trained professionals of the apex industrial civilisation of the time. They all nearly died before they were picked up by local Aboriginals who knew where to find food and water and how to prepare it safely. Some of this was basic know-how like orientation and food preparation practices, but some of it only got relevant during extreme climate events (which used to be infrequent before a couple years ago). If there is a once-in-a-lifetime drought, it is really useful to remember where the water holes are hidden in the landscape. If there is the odd flood, it is really good to know the safe bits of elevation. This information was better protected from transmission error when bundled up into shared narratives, inherited from generation to generation.

So that is what the Dreamtime is, except not really: It is a cosmology and an epistemology and a shared cultural framework, rolled into one, full of approaches and ideas that translate poorly, if at all, to Western concepts. It has now been also tangled up in all sorts of New Age Osho Tao of Pooh mumbo jumbo about magic rocks and floating like a leaf on a river and being one with the great spirit. This makes it even harder for the Western reader, including the Western reader in the burbs of Sydney, to figure out what the Dreamtime is or what it is supposed to do. Carpentaria does its darned best to give you an idea.

Standpoint epistemology

The central principle of Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory is that we should include a diverse set of voices into our decision making: women, Catholics, black people, workers, queer people, the left-handed. And, you know, we should do that not because we want women, Catholics, and the left-handed to feel better and not because we want to give them something to do, but because a diverse set of voices generate better solutions for problems and avoid the kinds of groupthink scenarios where everyone absolutely agrees on the same path forward with a stern resolution that lasts until theory interfaces with reality and everything turns very bad.

There is literal standpoint epistemology going on in Carpentaria, with us jumping from standpoint to standpoint, often looking at the same set of events (or what we gather about them) from a range of perspectives. But a lot more goes on above and beyond this Columbo-level switcheroo. Often, we learn the most from the absence of a perspective. Descriptions take primacy over a discernible empirical reality. The logic of the world is pieced together from teleological historic accounts. The importance of shared, non-fungible semiotic representations is underlined over and over again. We get a sense of the Dreamtime.

A lot goes on with naming and names. As a token of goodwill in fragile and steadily worsening race relations, the Invader citizens of the town of Desperance name the local river, currently called Victoria or Albert or whatnot, after Norm Phantom, who is the most respectable Aboriginal leader they can think of (and that’s not very respectable at all). This is met with widespread bafflement in the Aboriginal community, since the river has had a name for time immemorial (and pointedly not Victoria). Later, the turntables turn as the state of Queensland tries to change the name of the town from Desperance to something more uplifting, which meets stiff resistance, this time from the local Invader citizens, who identify wholesale with its rough masculine bravado.

Invaders have a limited understanding of the landscape and the climate, largely unprepared for those extreme climate events we mentioned earlier, hazarding poor guesses on what ocean currents will go where, when storm systems will land, and which plains will and will not flood, often brute-forcing their way through the landscape using satellites and helicopters. And while this would lend itself to a thin reading of an immutable, misunderstood Dreamtime and an Avatar-type reckoning with Invader Hubris, the book really tries to go beyond that, to show that the World Serpent is alive, that we build our houses on its nest, and that whatever takes place today, the death of black children at the hands of institutionalised violence, the large-scale destruction of property and morals, the desperate, feverish white suicides spraying the end of the novel, all integrate into the landscape and the narrative.

The body

But no wait, Carpentaria isn’t about this at all. It’s a book about ceremonial burial. All works of fiction take a stab at the meaning of everything and this seems to be what we are going with here. People fuss a lot about the dead in this book. Neither the practical stoicism of the Aboriginals nor the streamlined technofascism of the Invaders would readily lend itself to the apparent sentimentality on display here, on display in the Heraclian efforts to move the dead, to carry the dead around, to misplace the dead, or to make sure the dead are where they supposed to be. It shouldn’t matter, one would think, they are dead.

Elias Smith, the Osiris / Weekend at Bernie’s character is the main, if not only, object of all this deliberation in the novel. His body is used by various parties to lure people out of hiding, to send a message, to set up boundaries, and to find the natural order of things, with the body itself showing a surprising amount of agency, not the least in how much other people talk to it. Finishing the book, I found it striking how much this particular dead man kept coming back through all the landscaping and narrating that was going on.

William Langewiesche wrote a book on the cleanup effort, or, as he calls it, the unbuilding of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The whole project was much less centralised than you’d think, with a rogue’s gallery of agencies and services improvising and coordinating with each other, and this worked remarkably well as a flexible response to an unprecedented national catastrophe. It also brought friction: police and firefighters had regular scuffles over managing access to the site, some of which led to proper fistfights. Langewiesche puts these conflicts in a larger context but also makes clear that, at their core, they were typically about access to dead bodies. Like, firefighters would find one of their own and halt demolition until they could extract the body as undamaged as possible, even if this meant hours’ delay. Multiple characters reflect on what was seen as both a nuisance and a deeply felt human need, the burial of the individual taking temporary precedence over large scale disaster. The best quote comes from David Schomburg, the Medical Examiner’s principal liaison, someone already very familiar with the dead:

“The body becomes like the ultimate symbol. It represents the person we knew, the person we loved. And when that body no longer reacts—when it’s dead—in our minds, now we have to accept that this is so. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.” Carpentaria gives us a whole new language, a whole new standpoint, to look at this simple fact.