Embedded Files
Patricia Wrightson
On seeing the title I thought it was science fiction and, in a way it is. It is about exploring an intelligence and a sentience very different from our own. How do we treat that unknown? What of our humanity does it reveal? The setting is far from futeristic though, it talks of the ancient and the obscure. It also talks of the deeply human and relatable. In our first introduction to Simon (the main character), we find him orphaned, his mind obsessing over the fact that he, unknowing, carried on playing football when his parents died. This hammer blow of emotion is delivered with the lightness of falling snow, matter of fact and wonderful for it. Simon goes to live with his aunt and uncle not with eagerness but because one place has become much the same to him with the loss of his parents. They take him up to Wongadilla, a farm in the Australian mountains and, at first, the remotness of it jars at him. This partly stems from a determination, unconscious and overwhelming, not to be happy. He tries to push boundaries, looking for argument to reinforce his unhappiness but, gently with quiet understanding Edie and Charlie bring him out of himself. They don't do it alone but with the magic of the place, something that startles Simon into a better mental state.
There are no pictures in the book but the map is wonderful. It shows how zoomed in the story is and feels like the trees are marks of individual growth rather than a key. It immediately moved me into an expectation that the story would be about exploration and discovery. Simon's discoveries are not geographical, they are about the secrets and the mythology of the place. He finds, and finds a way to communicate with, the ancient spirits of Wongadilla. They are capricious and playful but their humours often show humanity writ long. The spirit of the swamp revels in the idea of tricking a boy, something to chuckle over through the centuries. They seek experiences and ideas to hold.
The Nargun is less clear in its motivations despite getting whole chapters dedicated to its point of view. It is older than the other spirits and, in some ways, less sure of itself - restless on a scale of centuries. Those first chapters show its danger but also a lack of malice, a word often used about it is its love, but it always a strange kind of love. The kind of love that might kill man or boy.
When the Nargun becomes more apparent it is approached with almost scientific curiosity. A need to understand and clarify the risk it presents. An alliance emerges between the local spirits and the humans but there are inherent tensions of perspective. What seems urgent to a human is a blip to something that measures its life in millennia. It feels at the begining that this will be a story of a child operating around adults' awareness, dealing the strangeness they can't understand, but this is not that kind of story and stronger for it. It remembers the child in every adult. It also carries a deep love and understanding of place, the descriptions of mountains made me feel I was in the mountains and so many details are just right, I particularly loved the description of Simon unable to stop climbing because the going was hard, a way of being wrapped up in the mountain that chimed with me.
The story has its moral ambiguities too. The Nargun is threatening mostly for its strangeness and unpredictability. Attempts to counter it often feel inadvised and echo humanity's struggle to roll with the punches of nature, to work with it, not to look into the sun. That is balanced by the reader's memory that in the accounts of the Nargun's centuries long treck across the country it occasionally left bodies in its wake, we fear for the characters we have grown to love and, at times are driven by that fear. Charlie has a certainty here that neither Simon nor Edie possess and that certainty drives the story. It is easy to get caught up in that certainty, mostly because the main characters are so likeable, Simon in his growing sense of comfort and belonging, Charlie with his steady surety and Edie with a wonderfully understated touch of humour.
I don't know how faithful the material drawn from aboriginal folklore is because I lack the knowledge to make that judgment but, Patricia Wrightson has a reputation for doing her research and was warmly received by aboriginal leaders when she wrote this and other books which gives me confidence in the representation.
Written by Jack
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