How do you talk about a novel so massive, so voluble, so amplified by eagerness to speak for itself? Part of me is tempted to say: let it. Let it relate, tell, inform, scold, witness, bear whoever attempts it. First Nations literature in colonial countries is too often spoken for, or over. Let it speak already! (My ideal festival scenario: host angles their microphone not toward the author but their book, propped upon the marquee chair, inviting it to relate its story; the festival audience nods sagely, relieved for once to find themselves in the presence of someone so insightful about their own work.)
The Miles Franklin award-winning author Alexis Wright’s new novel is set in the Aboriginal community it is named for, Praiseworthy, a “prize-winning tidy town” caught in an era of great untidiness: its “coffin-choked land” filled with asbestos homes and “cruelty chic”, the “tumbledown life of poverty” periodically interrupted by “endless spite Twittering” – “the big-ticket underbelly of shrilly-dilly blame-calling”. As in all Wright’s work, Praiseworthy depicts cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: a realist’s view of colonisation, in short.
One fateful day, an “airborne anti-miraculousness” descends: a mysterious haze, the sum total of everything out of joint in the community. The townspeople do everything to combat it: spruik it as a tourist attraction, wait for government to blow it up, play it Dvorak and Bach, consider amending the constitution, send a butterfly to Canberra (the government shoots it with a blowtorch), build a giant hologram scarecrow of the mayor to scare it away. None of it works.
Into this chaos steps Cause, patriarch of the Steel family. Visionary and creator, collapsologist and local influencer – “freaky doomsayer”, “anomaly man”, “atmospheric pressure blackfella” – Cause is possessed by a “blue-sky vision” and can foresee a global climate crisis and the total collapse of the first-world economy. He puts his faith in Australia’s 5 million feral donkeys, hoping to create an Aboriginal-owned carbon neutral transport industry and ride out the end times upon their resilient, load-bearing backs. “Imagine! A donkey could replace Qantas itself and be far more sustainable.”
Cause’s cause echoes that of many colonised peoples, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous: how to use the techniques and tools of the coloniser while honouring your own cultural sovereignty and independence.
Maintaining its tidy appearance amid bad plumbing, overcrowded public housing, polluted water and faulty electricity, Praiseworthy’s denizens can be forgiven for pursuing visions of better things. Cause’s wife, Dance Steel, the “moth-er Mother”, follows butterfly songlines across country, searching for a people smuggler to take her to China so that she can reconnect with her ancestral roots. (Praiseworthy’s suspicion of the Steel family ancestry is a withering satire of demands for cultural essentialism, purity and “real Aboriginality”.)
Tommyhawk Steel, the youngest son, exists not so much in Praiseworthy as online, in “the ether universe of global citizens”; he’s a “government-indoctrinated robotic type of kid fascist”. Craving escape, his is the silent cry of the soi-disant world citizen, aggrieved at their passport’s delay: “Hex! Hex! Be gone folk people!”. The virus of white commentary has taken hold of his brain; he obsessively listens to the media’s reports of paedophilia in Aboriginal communities, and no longer sees himself as safe among his own people. Despising his father, Tommyhawk’s Oedipal drive takes as its mother figure the Canberra minister who will spirit him away from Praiseworthy – a beneficent “blonde-haired White God Government Mother of a quarter of a million unloved Aboriginal children scattered across the country”. The internet is his sermon, Canberra’s parliament-issued iPad his tablet from the mount – with the “Government for Aboriginal People in Canberra” playing the role of Moses.
Tommyhawk’s elder brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty – so called because those were “the only words [his father] loved to say” – is a 17-year-old dancer and boxer. Destined by lore to marry his promised wife, a 15-year-old girl, Sovereignty is informed on by his brother and taken into custody: in the eyes of White law, their relationship amounts to paedophilia, the raping of a minor.
Born in 2000, Tommyhawk’s age nominally places at least some of the events of the book around 2008, the time of Howard-era intervention – a boot that was eager to stamp on the face of Aboriginal self-determination for ever. (Wright has described as “idealistic” the belief she once held that Aboriginal self-government could be achieved, before the Northern Territory intervention “[killed] the spirit of so many of our people”.)
Yet Praiseworthy is a moving target, narrated from all times: we get the language and claims of the Intervention (which themselves are caught in a vicious loop), but also funding acquittal forms and fake news, Canberra and cancellation, Johann Strauss and social distancing, Trump and time immemorial.
This anti-realist mode is heightened by each chapter’s framing device, in which an oracle is invited to speak. History does not repeat here – arriving first as tragedy then as farce – but rather lies idle, bumper to bumper, tragedy and farce combined.
The relative absence in Praiseworthy of traits commonly associated with “the novel” recalls Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, a book freighted with a similar air of paranoia (or, as Wright puts it, “spies, robbers, rabbits, ghosts”). Praiseworthy is less concerned with psychological portraiture, and realism’s sometimes stultifying attachment to mimesis, than it is with what lies beyond realism itself. And why should we assume the novel – as a genre – is synonymous with realism? Every mode is here: burlesque, sentimental education (Tommyhawk pining for his golden-haired lady), elegy, caricature, fable, lyric, eschatology, satire, polemic, treatise, yarn, romance, melodrama, Pilgrim’s Progress, picaresque, oral history, Menippean satire, cli-fi, SF, noir hardboiled and soft, and nursery rhyme.
Linguistically commodious, panoramically plotted, Praiseworthy’s 700-plus-page scale would have given Henry James a heart attack: it is a baggy monster, and more monstrous than most. Its vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo. All life, as in Balzac, is here, on a scale far bigger than anything the caffeinated Frenchman envisioned: Wright gives us the living and the dead, material and non-material, Country and people; all the masters dreamed of, and all they neglected to; the entire human (and non-human) comedy.
The sense is of Country cheerfully accommodating everything: high and low, chaos and epiphany, farce and deep time. Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain.
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright is published by Giramondo ($39.95)
