The third novel from acclaimed Australian author Robbie Arnott comes garlanded with high expectations, and within six pages it’s clear that despite its fey title, Limberlost stands a good chance of living up to them. Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.”
That is, by any measure, a gorgeous paragraph, and the rest of the novel is full of similar moments. Arnott’s prose is syntactically sparse but linguistically rich; not unlike that of Cynan Jones, or the writer who (at a guess) influenced them both and many others, Cormac McCarthy. Limberlost tells the life story of Ned West, the youngest son of a war-damaged Tasmanian widower and orchardist, from his early days as a quiet boy full of feelings he doesn’t have words for, to a terse young adult, a father struggling to understand the marks left by the past, and an elderly man trying to adapt to a changed and changing world.
This isn’t a plot-driven novel: young Ned sells rabbit skins in order to earn enough to buy a boat, restores the boat and learns to sail; he accidentally traps and then rehabilitates a fierce Tasmanian marsupial called a quoll; he misses his brothers, away fighting in the second world war; he grapples with masculinity while working in physically demanding jobs; he falls in love, marries and has children, grows old. It’s not unlike Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life, though with a little less facility for the grand sweep of history taking place around the reserved main character and determining his life.
It’s a lovely read for anyone who enjoys descriptive writing, but would be more compelling with some tightening up of the nuts and bolts of storytelling: plot, pace and point of view. We’re told Ned really wants a boat, and this goal is what the first third of the book moves us towards, but we never really feel his need or fully understand why it takes this form. An inciting incident in which his father takes all three boys to see a supposedly mad whale lingers in Ned’s memory, but its meaning remains confused even as more details emerge: does it matter to Ned as a moment of male familial solidarity, because his father showed bravery, because one of his brothers lent him a coat and he can’t remember which, or because they did (or didn’t) see a mad (or possibly perfectly ordinary) whale?
When Ned falls in love, his partner remains unnamed until close to the novel’s end; it’s a gamble that doesn’t pay off, rendering an already rather sketched-in female character even less real without adding any much-needed narrative propulsion. Now and then there’s a throwaway feeling, as though some parts of the story aren’t very present for Arnott: Ned’s sister Maggie returns from staying with “a distant aunt”; not long married, Ned and his wife work in the garden, “her love winking through … as they threw loose dirt at each other”. Many of the details of a trip to the English Lake District, populated by flat-capped “West Anglians” and their collies, are likely to make British readers wince.
Limberlost is told in a closeup third person; this allows for limited departure from the main character’s experience – usually for scene setting – but here isn’t handled consistently enough. Episodes are described in vivid detail that Ned doesn’t witness, such as his brother saving a ram and his friend Jackbird’s sister being injured by a gun. The language assigned to these sections is not that of the interlocutors who have brought him this news, nor the taciturn wordlessness of Ned’s own interior life. When Ned works out how to make a rudder we’re told he “hadn’t read it in a book or heard it from a salt-skinned shipwright”: with those last three words, Arnott’s predilection for alliteration disrupts the illusion of being inside his character’s mind. This matters – it diminishes our belief in Ned and our ability to be moved by his story each time his creator clears his throat and elbows in to his world.
It’s incredibly hard to tell a simple story; in some ways it’s harder than rattling through 80,000 words of events, dear boy, events. To do it via a main character who doesn’t provide constant commentary on their thoughts and feelings is even harder still. A luminously told, whole-life story of a young boy discovering how to be his own man, Limberlost aims far higher than it at first might seem, and only just falls short.
• Melissa Harrison is the author of All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury). Limberlost by Robbie Arnott is published by Atlantic (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
