Eva Hornung’s novels have been praised for their visceral and sometimes brutal depictions; their darkness, but also sensuality and their exploration of risky themes. 2009’s Dog Boy, a harrowing but compelling novel about a boy who grows up in a pack of feral dogs, won the Prime Minister’s Literary award; The Last Garden, about the repercussions of a murder-suicide, was awarded the 2018 South Australian Premier’s Prize for Literature.
The Minstrels is the South Australian author at her most ambitious: an epic that spans the lifetime of its protagonist, and reckons with not only personal tragedies and family drama, but the larger wound of First Nations’ dispossession and the climate crisis.
The story follows Gem, a feisty young girl who, along with her older brother Will, enjoys all the freedoms of farm life on the family property in Dunriver (or as locals pronounce it, Dunrver), a small town in an unspecified part of Australia. But it’s a harsh world, and drought is omnipresent: “Drought in other places started and ended; in Dunrver it lived on in the mind even when the fields were green and crops bumpers. Drought elsewhere had a mystery to it. Drought in Dunrver had none, just grit in the eyes and a narrowing of the path to the future.”
The first third of the novel plods along as it establishes the setting and Gem and Will’s close relationship, Hornung relying on finely wrought sentences and paragraphs that contain whole worlds, even when the narrative splinters into asides. An example:
“Gem’s mind made maps; Will’s didn’t. Gem’s numbers were arrayed either on a vertical or horizontal axis. On the vertical, they travelled a road straight up from one to twenty, then horizontal to the left twenty-one to thirty; vertical again thirty-one to forty, horizontal back to the original track forty-one to fifty, then vertical to 120.”
If Gem were not such beguiling company, and her relationship with her brother not so intriguing, a reader might be tempted to wonder what all this is about.
But then something happens, during what is known as “the harvest run”: an annual ritual in which the district’s teenagers don balaclavas and sprint to a gorge and pools known as “the Minstrels” to lose their virginity. For Gem and Will, everything changes during one such run, and afterwards Gem moves to the city, where she is briefly cared for by an aunt (who is more than an aunt). When she returns home, things feel irrevocably broken, and before long she leaves for the city again and university, living in share houses and then alone.
Decades of self discovery follow – and then an unexpected letter from a lawyer forces Gem back to the family property. She discovers she is a highly capable farmer, and relishes the work, even though she is haunted by the grief she’s experienced in this place.
Hornung excels at depicting the hardship and brutality of farm life, as in a vivid scene of a ewe in tortured labour:
“The ewe lay on her side, straining, but, where waters should have burst and small knobbly limbs encased in a veil of translucent flesh should have appeared, there was nothing … An hour crept by. The ewe wailed and wheezed faintly with the contractions, her legs sticking out stiffly like bloated roadkill.”
Time marches forward, Gem ages, and soon the novel enters the realm of speculative fiction – or not so speculative, in this era of climate disaster, division, drones and AI. Gem, tenacious as ever, ploughs on, forging connections with others in the district who are trying to survive, including Uncle Jim, a First Nations elder, with whom Gem collaborates to help preserve the local language. There is also local teen Benjamin, an animal rights activist who eventually becomes like a son to Gem; and a smart and spirited girl called Memory, who appears out of nowhere, enabling the group to form a kind of family.
Slowly, but inescapably, the world outside the farm becomes a dangerous place, but Gem is determined to live with depth and meaning. And that seems to be the Minstrels’ central and, at times, raging question: how are we to live on this continent as we progressively destroy every part of it?
The Minstrels is sometimes an uncomfortable read; while the beauty and playfulness of the prose dazzles, and Gem is an extraordinary creation, the fragmentary and tangential nature of the narrative can be distracting, and elements of the plot (one of which can’t be talked about without spoiling) are confronting. Some argue that white writers would do well to refrain from telling Black stories; others that there are ways to do it well. In this case, Gem’s collaboration with Uncle Jim to preserve the local language treats him as a source of learning for her – as a prop or guide in her journey – in a way that feels a little tone deaf.
Hornung’s willingness to tackle difficult themes and topics feels audacious in an era of extreme caution – from authors as well as their publishers. This is a novel that will disturb and perhaps even anger some. But the Minstrels also feels like a necessary novel, artfully examining how we might still be able to live with purpose, and how we might retain a close relationship with the land and with each other.
The Minstrels by Eva Hornung is published by Text ($34.99)
