Praiseworthy

November 15, 2023
A sprawling mythic narrative of contemporary dysfunction and resistance. Set in a small town in northern Australia sometime in the 21st century, this novel tells the story, in a fabulist mode teeming with plotlines and ancestral presences, of an Indigenous family's response to climate catastrophe and longstanding abuse and neglect by a colonial power. Over roughly 700 pages, we track the fates of four central characters as a disorienting, lethal haze settles over their community. Cause Man Steel, the patriarch, becomes engaged in a manic quest to round up millions of feral donkeys as replacements for carbon-based transportation. His wife, Dance, plots an escape to China while enduring her community's suspicions about her racial authenticity. Aboriginal Sovereignty, the elder son, disappears after embarking on an illicit romance which seems to confirm the prejudices of white culture. Tommyhawk, the younger son, plunges into an internet obsession and rejects both his family and his Aboriginal heritage in favor of the promises of government authorities. A dizzying range of storytelling modes are employed as the plot unfolds; the overall narrative may be thought of as something like a traditional songline or dreaming track, but it includes sections reminiscent of Western genres as disparate as science fiction, classical myth, romance, and melodrama. Among the insistent themes, which reverberate in sometimes startling ways, are the ongoing consequences of historical trauma on a colonized people and the failure of a settler culture to confront its ongoing culpability--and commit to reconciliation--in good faith. If one can keep up with the demands of this challenging book, the rewards are undeniable; what emerges at last is a shimmering vision of the legacy of colonialism in Australia, and the reasons for optimism in hoping for greater justice and autonomy for its Indigenous peoples. A rich, dream-like journey through an Aboriginal mythos.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 27, 2023
This freewheeling and heartbreaking masterpiece from Aboriginal Australian author Wright (Carpenteria) brims with the magic of myth and the painful realities of present-day climate change. An “ochre-coloured haze” has descended on the remote town of Praiseworthy, Australia, “claiming ultimate sovereignty of the flatlands” and portending ecological disaster. A man variously known as Widespread, Planet, and Cause Man Steel comes up with a harebrained and quixotic plan for surviving the future. Based on a dream he once had, it involves an “empire” of “super-charged donkeys that were fit for a super-charged climate.” Meanwhile, Widespread’s elder son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, who’s distraught after having been accused of raping the underage girl he’s in love with (she’s only 18 months younger), considers suicide. Widespread’s younger son, Tommyhawk, whom his father calls a “born fascist,” hopes his brother follows through on his plan and thereby avoid a public trial that would upset Tommyhawk’s desire to assimilate into white society. Rounding out the cast is Dance Steel, Widespread’s wife, who’s “like a haven for butterflies or moths” because she speaks “the moths’ frequency, a language of millennia which she had learnt in dreams which were only ever about butterflies and moths.” At once lush and relentless, Wright’s looping tale combines magical realism, absurdism, and maximalism in a rich depiction of contemporary Aboriginal life. This is unforgettable.