Some small, personal mythologies are inevitable: stories that get told and retold – to others, to ourselves. For Ned, the main character in Tasmanian Robbie Arnott’s third novel, these coalesce around a single teenage summer. His brothers – “soundless, inscrutable” Bill; charming, reckless Toby – are away at war. His father and sister, Maggie, are stoic but distant, racked by unspoken dread. All three get on with the business of the family orchard in the island’s north (Limberlost, named for the natural haven in Ned’s dead mother’s favourite book). Ned is otherwise left largely to his own devices. Specifically, hunting rabbits to sell for pelts, to buy a boat. Or, not so much a boat as “what he’d feel in the grip of its planks”: a soft freedom, a means to enact competence, physically, in the world.
Limberlost at first seems like a known quantity: quiet man comes of age, wrestles with self and duty, both soothed and troubled by nature. Hardly threadbare territory, but nor is it new. This is also by far Arnott’s most realist outing, less formally interesting than Flames; less conceptually epic than The Rain Heron. But his exploration of mid-century Anglo masculinity – inarticulate fathers, loggers “mirror[ing] the violence they’d wreaked on the [trees] … in the way they treated their own bodies” – dovetails with subtler matter. Ned longs “for his adult self to be more resolved” and to “not crash through the world, but slide into it”, private wishes which stem from something more nuanced than patriarchal pressure. This book, in which Arnott’s style has tempered into something rich and singing, flashes with the sensation of consciousness. Ned flays himself over spilled confidences, yearns to get it right – writhing under expectations that no one, perhaps, has placed on him. In his third-person portrait of Ned’s struggle “to convert … experience into meaningful language”, to conserve an autonomy both internal and intangible, Arnott touches the haze of being a person (duty, stress, panic, terror, pleasure), the shifting sting of being alive.
