In a lifetime of writing, Alexis Wright became aware of “how other people were telling stories on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia”. A national narrative manipulated by the most powerful, she wrote in a 2016 essay, would “constantly be on my mind while trying to tell stories of who we are … The cloud is always present.”
That cloud takes tangible form in her fourth novel, Praiseworthy, which follows 2013’s The Swan Book, a climate crisis dystopia, and 2006’s Carpentaria, winner of the Miles Franklin award. Set in the scorching, dirt‑poor fictional town of Praiseworthy on the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia, this incandescent, polyphonic novel – a free-wheeling, circling narrative told by 10 “oracles” – recalls the choral Tracker, Wright’s 2017 biography of an activist of the stolen generations assembled through first-person testimony. Yet besides Indigenous storytelling, the novel’s vernacular poetry, flights of magic realism and lyrical interiority about internalised hatred nod to other ancestors, from Homer, Joyce, García Márquez and Fuentes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
