The acclaimed author and poet has a long history writing about our relationship with place. His hypnotic new novel feels like a culmination, imploring us to listen
regory Day wants us to listen. Not to the bells of civilisation – the colonial pealing that keeps our trousers up, shielding us from our true beastly selves – but to the cacophonous medley of the land itself. The novelist, poet and essayist, whose accolades include the Patrick White Literary award and a Miles Franklin shortlisting, has a long history writing about the symbiotic relationships between place, nature and language.
“I found a great light was breaking in my mind,” she later describes to her uncle, an avant garde autodidact who acutely shares and nurtures her experience. Day’s lyrical prose does great justice to this “long clench releasing”, a chrysalis emergence of Sarah’s creative osmosis with the land. While Sarah and Ferny live an intimate life on the farm, authorial peregrinations on humankind-nature relations largely permeate the novel, though several events offer plot. One is the epic hewing together of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a springboard off which Day delves into the rich synaptic connections of creativity, identity and place.
Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The novel’s incantatory yet challenging prose makes flaneurs of its readers, leading us down innumerable warrens of evocative natural imagery and sinuous thought. It is heart-sleevingly earnest and sometimes overwritten, but often it is hypnotic, eschewing read-by-numbers storytelling that deadens much contemporary Australian fiction. It is also resplendent with literary allusions and encyclopaedic ecological knowledge.
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