Dusk
By Robbie Arnott (Picador, $39.99)
Reviewed by Sue Reidy
The best in Aussie fiction is on display in Robbie Arnott’s latest historical novel.
Thirty-seven-year-old twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw are homeless, low on funds and out of work when they learn that a bounty has been placed on a puma named Dusk that has already killed half a dozen men. Out of options and desperate for income, ill-equipped (they have no rifle), and without a clear plan of action, the twins set off on horseback into the highlands of Van Diemen’s Land with their swags and tents to capture Dusk and claim the prize.
The story is told primarily from Iris’s point of view. Haunting flashbacks offer glimpses of the twins’ harsh lives before fleeing from their parents 20 years earlier. Forced into collaborating with their parents’ thievery, Iris and Floyd as children existed “fighting the rough grip of a hard world”. Their parents were deported convicts, which locates the story between the early- and mid-19th century in Tasmania.
Permanently tainted by the reputations of their deceased parents, who maintained their criminal activity in their new homeland – stealing and scavenging seal oil, crops, livestock – Iris and Floyd have remained outcasts. Locals have dismissed the adult twins as “labourers, hunters, thieves or worse”.
Before pursuing Dusk, the twins’ lives reflected an unrelenting struggle for survival. They picked up casual work where they could, fishing, slaughtering bobby calves, hunting black swans with spears and killing mutton birds.
Their most valuable asset is their indestructible bond of allegiance to each other. Floyd is burdened by constant back pain which his loyal sister tries to mitigate. It is not until a dramatic flashback towards the end of the novel that the origin of his unhealed injury is revealed.
The forest wilderness through which the twins journey on their quest is evoked in vibrant prose. The landscape is as much a character as the humans who blunder through it. So, too, with the extremes of weather they experience. Both are attuned to the natural world. Iris is particularly moved by her new environment, “feeling a deep, beyond-human connection”, allowing it to permeate and alter her.
Shrewd, wary and observant, the twins nevertheless make mistakes and miscalculations for which they pay a high price. Early in the novel, Iris has a fateful meeting at a tavern with Patrick Lees, a man she is inexplicably attracted to and seriously misjudges. He proves to be an unscrupulous, duplicitous, arrogant man. He intends the twins only harm and has his own nefarious plans for capturing Dusk.
A third of the way through the novel Iris confronts the reality of pursuing Dusk, “the probability of being ripped into death, faster than blinking”. It is inevitable that the twins will encounter their quarry and nemesis, leading to explosive repercussions. Later, in a dramatic confrontation between bounty hunters and graziers at the book’s conclusion, the outcome is not spelled out, but what is clear is that few will emerge unscathed.
Critically acclaimed Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott has delivered an outstanding work of imaginative historical fiction. A mythic adventure story with high stakes, relayed in lyrical yet spare language, Dusk represents the very best of Australian fiction.
Goodnight Tokyo
By Atsuhiro Yoshida (Europa Editions, $36.99)
Reviewed by Brigid Feehan
Short stories from acclaimed Japanese writer a pleasure to read.
‘There’s a certain style of writing known as the serial short story – a collection of short stories that at first glance appear to be separate tales, but which are actually connected to one another and which can in fact be read as a full-length novel.” So says Japanese writer Atsuhiro Yoshida, in the afterword to Goodnight Tokyo. This turns out to be an apt description of this book, the first of his more than 40 novels to be translated into English.
Each of the 12 tales begins at precisely 1am in Tokyo. In the first we meet Mitsuki, who sources props for a film company. Her latest mission is to find a bunch of loquats. She calls her trusty taxi driver, 50-year-old bachelor Matsui, and together they drive around the dark streets searching for this mysterious fruit. A text from Mitsuki’s boyfriend Koichi – a newspaper delivery boy with an obsession for the city’s crows – directs them to a loquat tree near a main intersection. There, they encounter 30-something Kanako high up in the tree’s branches. Kanako is a self-described “loquat thief”, harvesting the fruit to make wine. Matsui and Matsuki join her in her apartment for a glass.
In the next tale we follow Kanako to her night shift at a telephone counselling service, where she helps insomniacs with their broken hearts or with their quest to find watercolour paints before daybreak. The next tale introduces us to a detective, Shuro. Or is he an actor playing Detective Shuro?
There is a pleasingly puzzle-like nature to the way in which the increasing number of characters further complicates the collection’s web of connections.
We also meet characters such as the four women running a late-night diner, a young actress in a dormitory with 10 other homesick and competitive girls, an old man running an all-night curiosity shop, and another who dreams of running an all-night bar and serving freezing cold whiskey and coke.
The stories are linked by Matsui the taxi driver, who ends up ferrying most of the characters around at one stage or another, and by Detective Shuro – everyone is looking for something or someone and considers hiring the detective to help them in their quest. One of the four women who run the diner is Shuro’s long-lost love. There is a pleasingly puzzle-like nature to the way in which the increasing number of characters further complicates the collection’s web of connections.
The overarching theme is connection, and this theme is hammered home repeatedly – road intersections, the 11 isolated girls holding hands after a terrifying earthquake, the severing of phone lines, chance encounters resulting in family members being reunited. There is no danger of an obscure metaphor – one of the characters buys a wooden board, originally part of an old staircase, from the late-night curiosity shop. It’s the “one-more-to-the-second-floor” step, to help her “go to the next floor – or the next stage of life”. But this obviousness and clarity is all part of the book’s charm.
There’s a touch of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? The jobs are quirkier, and the setting is night time, but otherwise the variety of occupations and the fascination of lives lived in parallel is similar. And the sweetly benign nature of everyone’s concerns plus the stupendous number of coincidences would not be out of place in a children’s book.
Is this book a genuine but untaxing pleasure, like a jigsaw puzzle, or has it got something more profound to say? You could argue for either, or both.
