Published by Harper
Collins
NZ RRP $34.99
Reviewed by Maggie Rainey-Smith
This is an ambitious novel set in the Australian outback, a vast and yet
also minutely detailed canvas, full of colour, light and sound. It is the story of Kate who is given the
opportunity to go into the Outback to record ‘The Oldest Song in the World’ but
first she has to find the only woman left alive who can sing it.
How a story is told
and the voice of the protagonist is pivotal to holding a reader’s interest. Sometimes stories can be overly complex when
at their heart is a simple and compelling story – a kind of truth within the
fiction. This is how I feel about this
novel. Kate is a troubled
thirty-something student of linguistics with pretty much no self-esteem or
indeed much of an academic track record, who somehow finds herself given this
extraordinary assignment to track down a dying Aboriginal woman and record an
ancient song. This one central theme
was for me, enough to sustain the novel.
In particular, I liked the writing about the outback and the contact
with the Aboriginal people, the misconnections and often misguided intentions
of white people working with them. The
clash of cultures. But
Kate is not in the outback simply to record the oldest song, she is there to
address unresolved issues from her childhood.
Kate is an appeaser riddled with demons from
her past directly relevant to Adrian who is her prime contact in the outback
and it is he who holds the key to both her past and to the singer of the oldest
song. Somehow the link between Kate and
Adrian seemed less plausible and at times I felt it muddied an otherwise
compelling story. Kate is full of self
doubt which is frustrating at times but at other times it works well for her
character. Through her eagerness to
appease she treads carefully desperate not to offend anyone, desperate to
understand the local indigenous ways. Offence is taking easily in the outback
and ructions occur without warning due to misunderstandings between the whites
and the locals.
There are some great
observations of white attitudes to the Aboriginal people in the outback. Brilliantly
funny is the moment when the electioneering politician flies in to woo the
locals and tries to endear himself to the local grandmothers by telling them a
story of his own grandmother. He has no local language and resorts to mime and
ends up down on his knees in the dust almost in tears moved by his own
sentimental story, watched by the uncomprehending grandmothers. Already throughout the novel we’ve been told
how impossible the red dust is to get out of your clothing ... in a delightful
observation Kate thinks “his wife would
be explaining proudly to the dry-cleaner that her husband knew how to get down
amongst the voters”. There’s another
nicely rendered episode when the local school which has practically no pupils,
is suddenly inundated with pupils due to Kate’s efforts when she invites
Aboriginal woman to the school to show the children how to harvest bean pods, the
old way of making flour for damper – but the school can’t accommodate this and
refuse to adjust their preconceptions of what the school is about.
The writing varies
with some very nice and atmospheric descriptions of the outback as well as some
slightly awkward descriptions of people e.g. “tendrils of curls had escaped his
ponytail and frilled around his high forehead like a curtain around a stage,
just about to open on a performance” which for me stopped the flow of the
narrative at times. But then further
on, near the end, when Kate goes out overnight to a special ceremony with the
local indigenous women and wakes just before dawn to hear the earth
singing. “It might have been a dream”
... I was convinced that she heard the earth singing and that the author
herself had experienced this.
Sue Woolfe worked as
a Creative Writing Tutor at Sydney University during the seven years it took
for her to write this novel. Her
research took her into the outback including “the better part of two years in the
Territory” where she was told she needed “to learn to sit in the dust and
listen”. It this this aspect of the
novel, her observations of the locals and the culture clashes, although
fictional which feel authentic and I found really interesting. Where it didn’t quite work so well for
me was the balancing act between Kate and her past and what had driven her to
the outback. This is a novel I found
frustrating at times to read, but now that I have finished it, I find it
lingers and resonates. There is the risk that Kate is too weak and too ‘good’
and so a construct or a vehicle for the story of the oldest song in the world –
is she authentic enough – well, I’ll leave that for you to decide. I wasn’t sure as I was reading the novel that
I believed in Kate, but writing this review I find perhaps I want to.
Footnote:
Maggie Rainey-Smith (right) is a Wellington writer and regular guest reviewer on Beattie's Book Blog. She is also Chair of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors.
By Sue Woolfe
Published by Harper
Collins
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