Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright’s award-winning classic Carpentaria : “a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel―stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humor, sweetened by spiraling lyricism” ( The Australian ) Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characters―the outcast savior Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the garbage dump and the fish-embalming king of Angel Day and Normal Phantom―who stand like giants in a storm-swept world. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. She has a narrative gift for remaking reality itself, altering along her way, as if casually, the perception of what a novel can do with the inside of the reader's mind. Carpentaria is “an epic, exhilarating, unsettling novel” ( Wall Street Journal ) that is not to be missed.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Indigenous, Literature, Audiobook

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Alexis Wright is from the Waanji people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her acclaimed first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 by University of Queensland Press and was shortlisted in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, The Age Book of the Year, and the NSW Premier's Awards. The novel has been translated into French.

Alexis has published award-winning short stories and her other books are the anthology Take Power (Jukurrpa Books, l998), celebrating 20 years of land rights in Central Australia; and Grog War (Magabala,1997), an examination of the alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek.

Her latest novel, Carpentaria was published by Giramondo in 2006. An epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come, the novel tells of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance. In 2007 Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Best Fiction Book, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year.

Biographical information from the Australia Council website.

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Carpentaria is an aboriginal epic; it’s a soaring story full of imagination that gives voice to Australia’s Indigenous population, though it is also horribly uncomfortable to read and even harder to enjoy.

Alexis Wright works directly with oral tradition, with folktale and myth, to interpose her narrative with as much authenticity as possible; she brings tribal legends into the modern space, asserting how important such things are to the remaining members of the civilisations that were almost destroyed. It’s an angry narrative, one oozing with frustration. The Aboriginals have lost their home and are forced to live in the most undesirable of locations in a nation that is rightfully theirs. Their birth-right has been usurped: their land stolen.

And the land is of such vital importance in understanding this novel; the Aboriginals are connected to it on a spiritual level. They understand it and care for it in ways the colonisers are completely dumb to. They speak to it, and it speaks back to them. They use it thwart the efforts of the white man and eventually attempt to destroy him with it. Magic is combined with faith and belief making it very hard to determine what is actually real within the story and what is a mere matter of an alternative understanding of reality.

This forms the crux of my conflicting opinion of the novel: I just don’t know quite what to take from it. Perhaps if I was an Australian I would understand it more and even more so if I was an Indigenous Australian: it may speak to certain readers on a stronger level, though I do think it of vital importance that we should read the writing of many authors on a wide global scale (not just the popular white western Eurocentric volumes that bombard the shelves and dominate the literary cannon.) It just so happens that this one is rather difficult. I feel like I need to read it again to conceptualise it, but I enjoyed the reading process so little that I will never bring myself to do so.

It’s a novel that really needed to be written, and it’s a novel that ought to be better known. At times it reminded me of modernist fiction in the vain of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s nonlinear and extremely confusing at times. I would not recommend this to readers who have not read similar fiction before, fiction that spirals in circles and messes with your mind as you try to put the pieces together and form an interpretation of what is actually happening.

Overall it’s an important piece of writing, but not one I, or many other readers, will engage with.

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This baffling, dreamlike epic rushes you up in a semi-conscious swirl of language into the wild tropical north of Australia, where Queensland sweeps round to cradle an armful of the Pacific in the form of the Gulf of Carpentaria – a land of savannas and tropical cyclones, of eucalypts and estuary streams, melaleucas, songlines, unscrupulous mining corporations, and back-country bogan settlements.

The Gulf country is also the homeland of the Waanyi people, from whom Alexis Wright is descended on her mother's side, and what Carpentaria is most obviously and essentially is a hymn to her people and to her home. It seems necessary to establish this, because it can be difficult to work out what else it might be. Postcolonial epic? Magic-realist fantasy? Indigenous polemic?

The book doesn't present itself as a simple proposition. At more than 500 pages, it feels, just from heaving the thing up in front of your face, like something that will require some work. And the language is constantly wrong-footing you as a reader – like something that's been run through Google Translate and back twice, full of not-quite-right constructions (‘for no good rhyme or reason’), redundancies (‘it fell down, descended down’), misused verbs (‘the thought abhorred him’), even apparent spelling mistakes (‘the mother load’) which might just be editorial slips but which nevertheless contribute to a general sense that language here is unstable, not always to be trusted.

When you read Wright's sentences, you do it gingerly, feeling ahead with your toes, not wanting to put your full weight on a phrase until you're sure it will hold. It reminded me a bit of reading Steve Aylett, though the tone couldn't be more different. Here the method is a kind of Aboriginal English that dares you to think of it as ‘broken’, mixing myth, jokes, and natural history. And then – every now and again – it will suddenly explode into some long, flawlessly poetic excursion positively drenched in the local landscape:

Thousands of dry balls of lemon-coloured spinifex, uprooted by the storm, rolled into town and were swept out to sea. From the termite mounds dotting the old country the dust storm gathered up untold swarms of flying ants dizzy with the smell of rain and sent them flying with the wind. Dead birds flew past. Animals racing in frightened droves were left behind in full flight, impaled on barbed-wire spikes along the boundary fences. In the sheddings of the earth's waste, plastic shopping bags from the rubbish dump rose up like ghosts into the troposphere of red skies to be taken for a ride, far away. Way out above the ocean, the pollution of dust and wind-ripped pieces of plastic gathered, then dropped with the salty humidity and sank in the waters far below, to become the unsightly decoration of a groper's highway deep in the sea.

The nearest thing we have to a hero is the patriarch Normal Phantom, who lives in an indigenous settlement outside the town of Desperance. Norm's community is in a long-running feud with another Aboriginal group on the other side of the village; and between them are the whitefellas of Uptown, run by the violent Mayor Bruiser, policed by the corrupt Officer Truthful, and inhabited by a roster of colourful characters like Lloydie, who runs the pub and is in love with a mermaid trapped in the wood of his bar. Meanwhile Norm's partner, Angel Day, has run off with the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, who leads a convoy endlessly following the Dreaming tracks, while his son Will Phantom is mounting a violent resistance against the local mining corporation…

These are figures that at times seem like characters in a joke (‘An Englishman, and Irishman and an Australian walked into a bar…’), and at other times assume the epic quality of mythic archetypes. Their stories blur into one another, with narratives that follow multiple timelines simultaneously, or loop back on themselves without warning. This is not a case of ‘magic realism’ (an unsatisfactory term), performed for metaphorical effect; rather, it deliberately reflects, I think, a completely different view of the world, one in which time and individuals are not especially important, and where the events of distant myth play an active role in current relationships and causalities.

The language of the novel is richly localised, busy with snappy gums, spearwood, eskies, myalls, skerricks, whirly-winds, gibber stones, sooty grunters, min min lights, big bikkies and a host of other Australianisms that pushed my Australian National Dictionary to the limits. Not to mention the many Aboriginal terms. The last time the Waanyi language was surveyed, in the early 80s, researchers found ‘about ten’ native speakers, so it's doubtless extinct by now; Carpentaria is, in this as in other things, an act of preservation as well as of modernisation.

I just don't know who to recommend it to. After a hundred pages I didn't understand it at all. After two hundred pages I thought I understood it, and didn't like it. I might easily have ditched it there, but the Goodreads review hanging over my head induced me to carry on – fortunately. After three hundred pages I was gripped, and by the time I finished I was deeply moved. Since then it's only kept expanding in my head, so that I now feel it's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in a long time. Lyrical, passionate, and seemingly detached from all the usual artistic traditions, it feels like you're hearing the genuine voice of a strange and distant land that has not been shown in literature before.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read – and not only because I’m one of the white settler colonialist that have made the lives of the indigenous peoples of this land such an ongoing nightmare. But it has a sense of time – of a kind of overlapping time – that challenges normal narrative structures. I want to start by saying that this is stunningly well written. The narrative voice is powerful and just runs. It doesn’t feel like a long book when you read it. Parts of it read like beat poetry. Allusions throughout to popular culture and history and songlines and dreaming swirl about you, and this is disorientating too. Characters disappear, essential characters, only to come back again at turning points of their own making or into a kind of maelstrom they are merely catalysts to. Some characters, I’m thinking of the petrol sniffers who suddenly become central to the story, didn’t exist in the pages of the book before they become essential. There is a suddenness to so much of this that when coupled with the dream like character of the time shifts and jumps in whose eyes we are seeing the world through at any moment becomes unsettling.

That one of the characters is called Hope and that this is set in a fictional town called Desperance tells you the novelist is playing games with you. I think one of the things I particularly liked about this was the ‘clash of civilisations’ where the local Aboriginal people are not only fighting amongst themselves, but this is in a context of being dominated by, well, arseholes, who have taken their lives, livelihoods, wives, daughters and everything else from them. One character, the law, likes to remind young girls of the time he chased them down and raped them. But this is a complex novel and not one that can be troubled by a simple reading. The characters have definite goals and these frequently come into conflict – they have complex belief structures that are struggling to make sense of a senseless world – they have 60,000 years of understanding the land that white people seem hell bent on destroying in slightly over 200 years. This is also a story of a lack of care and unintended consequences and a refusal to believe in the harm we cause or are party to and that can never be redeemed. This is a powerful novel – as many reviewers have said, among the best books written in Australia. It deserves all the praise it has received.

[Pavel Nedelcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

OUR HUMANITY PUT TO THE TEST

The description of the Aboriginals living around the Golf of Carpentaria is so precise, smooth, ironical, fairytalelike, perfect! The parallel with Western society so harsh, powerful and real.

Time and Space are differently conceived, and so are the environment, Nature and dreams' dimension in opposition to reality.

Two totally different cultures and societies excluding each other because too proud, too confident in their own beliefs, too greedy and racist. Is there any Hope left for Australians (white and black fella) to coexist and respect each other - and the environment? To live according to commonly shared laws and comply with their own identities?

The answer to that question is not to be found in this book either, wich closely and brilliantly deals with the problem, but in ourselves, in every each of us. So that the role of the book becomes actually that of presenting the problem in order to touch that inner part of us responsable of comprehension and compassion. In a nutshell, of humanity!

[Thoraiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I urge everybody to read this staggering book which is IMHO a work of immortal genius.

Seriously, it’s huge. When I think of authors whose books can barely contain the hugeness of what is inside them, I think of Dostoyevsky, Mishima and Ihimaera. And now we in Australia have the precious gift of Alexis Wright.

This is it. Forget about Baz Luhrmann. “Carpentaria” is the Great Australian Novel; the epic of our time. It isn’t a small book, or an easy read. You can’t get through it, for example, while a small child is holding a piece of popcorn an inch from your eye and asking if it looks more like a cloud or a flower, and that’s why it took me a couple of weeks to get through. “Carpentaria” is not “When The Snake Bites The Sun”. It is layered like bedrock and sharp as shark's teeth.

Read this if you are Australian. Read it if you like literary fiction. Maybe even read it if you’re neither but enjoy weighty fantasy tomes. While the journeys of some of Wright’s unforgettable characters could be seen as purely spiritual or allegorical, there’s a way to read it as supernatural, too, and such passages are as powerful and immersive as storytelling gets.

Incredibly, it looks like I’m only the second of my Goodreads friends to have read “Carpentaria” (and Rivqa only just beat me to the punch!) This 2007 winner of the Miles Franklin Award is overwhelmingly worthy, and I know I won’t be able to set foot in the far north of this country again without the legendary Norm Phantom, Angel Day, Will Phantom, Joseph Midnight, Girlie, Bala and all the others leaping to life in my imagination.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can see why Carpentaria won a Miles Franklin Award. It is a big book which tells an important story in a manner likely to be novel to many readers.

On its face, Carpentaria is the story of a town, Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving the reader an insight into tensions within the Aboriginal communities on the outskirts of the town and between them and the white people who live in the town itself. Underneath that, and far more importantly, it is a story about family, Country and Culture.

It was at first difficult for me to follow, as the first few chapters take an entirely non-linear path and at times appear somewhat unrelated. However, if the reader simply reads and accepts these chapters as separate stories, it soon becomes clear that they set the scene for the main events of the novel, as well as introducing many of the characters. Nothing is there by accident and no reading is wasted. The book is never entirely linear, but does become easier to follow, and the story easier to comprehend, as the reader learns more.

To try to explain more would give too much away. Let it suffice to say that Ms Wright's work is meticulous, and I suspect each word was placed with care. The reader is in safe hands.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inside knowledge about this river and coastal region is the Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began. Otherwise, how would one know where to look for the hidden underwater courses in the vast flooding mud plains, full of serpents and fish in the monsoon season? Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes underwater, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? Know the moment of climatic change better than they know themselves? Who fishes in the yellow coloured monsoonal runoff from the drainages, with sheets of deep water pouring into the wide rivers swollen over their banks, filling vast plains with flood waters? The cyclones linger and regroup, the rain never stops pouring, but the fat fish are abundant.

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its own mood. A river that spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour.

Alexis Wright's 2024 Miles Franklin Award winning Praiseworthy is, for me, without question the best novel of this period and one whose omission from even the longlist will be to the long-term shame of the Booker and Women's Prize judges.

But Carpentria was the novel that brought Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, to fame and literary recognition, also taking the Miles Franklin 18 years earlier, and one that showcases her unique literary style.

It is set in the ficticious 'waterless port' of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentria, home to the Pricklebush people, as well as a rival Aboriginal community and a town whose economy and politics are propped up by an international mining company.

If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.

Wright explained in 2008 how her literary influences draw both on the oral epics of her ancestors and culture, but then, very consciously, world literature, citing amongst others as influences alongside Carlos Fuentes, Seamus Heaney (whose poetry forms the epigraph), Edward Said, WG Sebald, Stephen Muecke, Toni Morrison, Kafka, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Borges and Italo Calvino (these last four all feature as the sources of epigraphs to the different sections of Praiseworthy):

The epical stories that come from our culture are probably the oldest literature in the world. I like hearing the voices of our own people telling stories. I have tried to replicate their voices, speech rhythms and regional influences in my writing. I have also learned from writers across the world and have looked at their work to examine questions about how to write. These questions have been about time, place, style, voice and writing from the perspective of belonging to long, ancient cultures.

And she commented on her use of time in her novels in 2007 when discussing Carpentaria in her publisher Giramondo's literary journal Heat 13:

I turned elsewhere to try to understand how to configure the history I know and what I understand of our realities. Carlos Fuentes, the South American novelist, once said that all times are important in Mexico, and that no time has been resolved. His is a country of suspended times. As Fuentes explains: ‘the European author writes with a sense of linear time, time progressing forward as it both directs and assimilates the past. Even the great literary and philosophical violations of purely lineal continuity – Vico’s corsi e ricorsi, Joyce’s vicocyclometers – presuppose that a linear time does exist.’

The boy thought about all of these eventualities, where the enigma of time sidestepped desire and ran away from dreams. His face lit into a smile as he looked up at the big man surveying the flood plains. All dreams come true somehow, Norm murmured, sizing up the flattened land-scape, already planning the home he would rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, among the spirits in the remains of the ghost town, where the snake slept underneath.

A brilliant novel, confirming for me Wright as one of the 21st century's greatest authors, and Praiseworthy takes this literary project to new heights.

Further reading

A profile of Wright, which gives helpful background to her work, can be found in The Monthly from April 2023.

A 2016 essay from Alexis Wright What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story? in Meanjin

An extract from about 5/6ths into the novel

Fishman led the way with a long stick, pushing along an ancient path invisible to the naked eye, heading through the foothills. Unquestioningly, instinctively, he was following a map etched on his mind from the times of the many fathers' fathers before him. The men followed in his footsteps, each sending off little bubble clouds of thoughts into the wind, thoughts of faraway places, of people and noise, children laughing, and dogs running down the road to see the convoy leaving. They threaded through golden papery grasses rustling with white flower tips, through flowing green-gold spinifex whispering through waving coolabah branches, and silent rock faces of red granite, white quartz, white-grey quartzite, all looking down, watching a funeral procession for the children who marked a full stop in history.
[...]
And the walls, they screamed at you with the cryptic, painted spirits of the Dreamtime. And inside the walls, was the movement of spirits, moving further and further forward, so the surface appeared to be falling into the frightened eyes of the Fishman's men. They all stood there inside, crowded like that. Old Fishman was in another world, crying and talking the dead language, walking around, gently pushing past anyone standing in his way. His staff pounded on the living wall, and the men looked away, down at the dusty floor, before seeing the Fishman moving forward through a narrow opening inside the resting spirit's body. The entrance must have been there already, but it was impossible to have noticed it, because the cave seemed so crowded and occupied with relics from other times. The song cycles' arias of devotion that had droned on in this place for days and days like locusts before rain, which came from forever in the old, musty air inside, were heard now. The men felt the sound lingering inside their heads.

So, it was with astonishment and awe, these men gaped at what they had been shown, and allowed themselves to be taken into the powerful spirituality, which was somehow the same, but much older than the ornate cathedrals made with stone, or the monasteries and places of worship to relics of bones and other bits and pieces of sanctified saints of old Europe and the Holy Land.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't understand much of what I read in this book - so my 'two star' rating isn't really a judgment on the quality of the novel, but on how much I enjoyed it, and how much I, personally, could piece together. I imagine if you're a literary sort, you could mine this deliciously for all kinds of repeated metaphor and thematics and meaning. I mostly spent the read going, "what is going on?"

In the largest terms, this is a book about the Aboriginal spirits of Australia being mightier than the workings of the interloper whites. All that the whites have created on the northern coast in a town called Desperance - segregation, poverty, racism, environmental damage - will be destroyed piece by piece, the spirits of land and sea ultimately taking back what's theirs by rights. Amid that are Aboriginal characters who act as witness, who sometimes have a hand in reading what the spirits are up to, and who occasionally act to help things along. Mostly, however, they're onlookers, aware of a world that the whites aren't, exactly, and both grateful and fearful of it in turn.

This is overwhelmingly a book about men. It's white men who commit the worst crimes toward land and other people in the novel; it's Aboriginal men who protest, undermine, and survive what goes on. Women are always problems - they're unfaithful, a disappointment to their fathers, nags, and most of all, they're stupid, judged so by the central male protagonists, or by their rejection of Aboriginal wisdom, and truthfully, they're written so by the author too. There are moments where the author suggests yes, these women are trapped by bad choices and economics and culture and waste, but overall there's less pen-time spent even hinting at that than sketching the broad, obvious strokes of white men's fight against black. Women are secondary characters, at best, and their existence is always meant to demonstrate something about a man's trials, a man's development, a man's fortune.

There are beautiful moments in the book, written with a clarity I didn't always find throughout - the death of Gordie and the ensuing ramifications for three Aboriginal boys, the police chief, and the mayor of the town was one of my favorite parts of the book. Still, my overall sense is that I just didn't get why some things were described at such length, or how and why things were included in the novel. Again, I think that probably says more about me than about Wright.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

The shelving, status update and star rating constitute how I felt about this book.

[Gabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unrelentless, often depressing story of an aborigines community told in a beautiful, mesmerizing style alternating between witty, sometimes naive seeming vernacular and lyrical, deeply soulful prose. Dreamtime and reality are interwoven in such an intimate way that the reader never really can draw a line between those two. The land and the spirtuality are one.

I was deeply impressed by this work that manages to depict the bleak existence of the aborigines under the racist government of the whites in a way that elevates the pain into something transcendent.

I would highly recommend this work of beauty to readers who have no problems with non-linear, surrealistic narration of magical realism.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be brutally honest, halfway through this book, it was still mostly a chore to read, so I'm a little surprised that I just unhesitatingly selected 5 stars to rate it, but that accurately reflects my journey in reading it. By the last few chapters, I was so thoroughly hooked I couldn't bear the thought of it ending.
It is hard to tell how much of that is that I simply enjoyed the much faster pace, clear stakes and emotional punchiness of the second half, and how much it is that Wright's style takes a long time to get comfortable with, so is less work later in the book. In either case, I not only found myself enjoying the book a lot more, but reassessing the assumptions I'd made about that style.
A few chapters in, I'd mentally pegged the style of Carpentaria as somewhere between Garrison Keilor-style small town character tales & the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isobelle Allende. I kinda love the former, and loath the latter, so the mystical slipping in and out jarred me at first, and I was hopeful for more of the small town material.
By the second half, I realised the novel really wasn't either of these things - and instead of trying to fit it into a literary canon, it was far more - liberating - to let go and just let Wright take you into *her* world. Nevertheless, since I am nowhere near the writer she is, I'm going to use some comparisons to try to explain.
The thing with the whole small-town-characters genre is that it tends to rest on a sense of continuity - things change in the lives of the characters, but not generally in the town itself. Carpentaria encompasses huge change, and well as huge continuity. Part of the tension that drives the novel is the balance between the world of country, which is, if definitely not unchanging, then resilient and enduring, and the world of the townies and the people, which is much more fragile and subject to upheaval than they expect. It is our central group of POV protagonists - Norm Phantom and his son Will and mentor religious leader Mozzie Fishman - who live in both worlds, adn as a consequence, are able to shape and impact on events. That all of these characters are blackfellas is a given - this understanding of country is timeless, and inexplicable without tradition, experience and connection.
Similarly, the magical realism comparison imposes a different kind of worldview on the novel. Even my sense of shifting in and out of mystic elements more clearly becomes a misassumption as the book progressed. This is a landscape with varied dimensions and shifting perspectives. The dizzying sense of moving between time periods - which honestly I found a headache to sort out while reading - and possibly the oft-ambiguous-and-sometimes-just-off grammar is also part of this sense of dislocated viewpoints on the same thing.
That our powerful, understanding characters are all men is a little disconcerting. The women who appear in the narrative - Angel Day, Girlie Phantom, Hope Phantom/Midnight - are all seen through the eyes of men, and appear absorbed by the immediate in a way male characters can transcend. Angel in particular is left ambiguous, stranded by the narrative in a place that feels vaguely hellish with her motivations still blurry and her character blurred by the hate and love of our POV characters.
It seems strange to me to describe this as a political book - as if any take on the Gulf world could not involve racism, institutional and otherwise, and the impact of mining. The themes are not artificial, and the book is about so much more than a town and a mine, these are simply starting points for an epic - an epic from a uniquely Australian viewpoint that sucks you in and throws you around and makes you long to return in the way only the best of novels do.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more conventional than what I’ve been reading lately, I’m nonetheless glad I read it. More like 3.5 stars. I’m rounding up because of the alien world this conjures. The world is palpable. The world building and the voice were quite enjoyable. When realism lapses, fabulism reigns—still some of the coincidences took me out a bit.

[Nick Grammos]

p.14 pure, undiluted quintessential essence

I can't add much more

[Claire · Rating 1 out of 5]

God, I hate this book. I can see how others might enjoy it and it's not an Objectively Bad book, but it was basically just everything I don't like in a book, and lacked everything that I personally look for in good novels.
The biggest turn-off for me was the characters and their relationships. I don't mind not liking characters, as long as it's fun and rewarding to hate them. These characters were just...nothing. I spent 500 pages with them but I still feel like I don't know them at all. And the relationships are just atrocious and really upsetting to read about. There is definitely merit in writing about abusive relationships, but only if it seems like there is point to them or literally just any attention called to them. Nearly every relationship is seemingly arbitrarily toxic and, as I'm sensitive to these things, the casual throwing in of Angel Day's abuse towards her children made me feel sick. It's never dealt with in literally any way and it upset me a lot.
The narrative style also left me feeling very distant from the text and thus I didn't care at all about the plot or feel like it had any urgency or meaning. Again, I'm aware this is a specific technique, but it's just not my taste. The writing style is very non-descript, which is okay if the plot stands out, but this work didn't succeed at either in my opinion.
Overall, it was painful to get through the book and I absolutely would've dropped it had it not been required reading.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book requires a lot of a reader, especially a non-indigenous reader. Being able to understand time as something other than linear is an important example.

I will say that I almost switched books after I wasn't really "grabbed" in the first two hundred or so pages. I would find my mind wandering while reading, and when I came back I would discover myself in a scene which was either a flashback, a fever dream, a legend, or an actual current event - it was hard to recognize which if you weren't paying attention to the signs. And sometimes even then it was hard. I think that's why I wouldn't categorize this as "magical realism" (a genre I adore). I think magical realism describes something "unnatural" superimposed on real time and place. But once you delve deep into this story, you start to understand that everything, from psychic visions to helicopter raids to enchanted sea journeys, are all equally "real." And time and place are not just flat surfaces.

I've read a little about Aboriginal worldviews, so I can perceive the sense here. I don't think I've read anything that described Australia (past and present, white and black, desert and sea) as richly as this novel. I'm so glad I stuck with it.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[diario_de_um_leitor_pjv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um interessante retrato da vida aborígene e dos conflitos com a população branca. Uma narrativa que meu deixou algo desiludido.

[ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been mulling on this for a couple of days, and while reading. There’s so much I loved about this book - particularly the way the plot was passed effortlessly between characters, to the point that there is no real main character but an ensemble of characters guiding us through. I also really loved the collective narrator voice - something that is hard to pull off, but works seamlessly here.

I really wanted to love love love this book, particularly because I love The Swan Book so much, but I think Carpentaria ultimately suffers from a lack of close editing. There were a number of places where it felt like the writing could be tightened a little, even on a line-by-line basis. There were also errors that took me out of the story.

But ultimately I am grateful to have experienced the world of Carpentaria, and for Wright’s fearlessness in reflecting the world/s around us.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need way more time to digest but this book is extraordinary. I've never before read anything that so effectively conveys an experience of living across two cultures. A lot of it was hard for me to follow, but I felt like that was part of the point; I was immersed in experiences that were strange and foreign even when they were familiar. It's not an easy read, but it's magnificent.

[Chris Chapman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utterly fantastical, mythical tale that never fails to convince, because of the power of the story-telling, the originality of the voice, the undeniable truths that are told. Shades of the Tempest, Lot's wife, the Odyssey, King Lear, the Prodigal Son … This book NEEDS to be better known!

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silly to really attempt reviewing this after one read, like most good books - so much to love but so hard to rate. Unlike anything I've ever read, in part a conscious rejection of the cishet white apparatus that informs "postmodern" western literature but to paint it as a broad-strokes "deconstruction" of these forms would be doing the text a huge disservice, as the novel itself is sui generis. Wright is undoubtedly a master of voice, and deeply aware of the nuances and sins of imperial culture, including how the oppressed can end up subscribing to the same terms and conditions that destroy them. Not a single fucking inch given to making white people comfortable here and the book would pack so much less of a punch if it did. But despite having so little "traditional" point A to B narrative catharsis [a necessary choice seemingly intended to filter out those who would despise this in the first 30 pages] there is so much to love here; beautiful and bizarre prose so focused on the spiritual nature of the elements [everything describing the sea and water here is hypnotic in its painterly detail], frequently funny despite the brutality of some of its subject matter and setpieces, and ultimately in service to a poignant family drama making up the backdrop of a blisteringly political, indeed at times polemic, story... Being a white and privileged imperial, I would say this book is not made for me, but I feel like Wright would contest this, given how the whole story is in large part about establishing understanding and connection between seemingly unbridgeable gaps. Either way, this needs a lot more recognition that it likely won't receive in my lifetime, but keep an eye out for this author.

[Boy Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carpentaria is the story of the Pricklebush mob living on the outskirts of the town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It's the story of Norm Phantom, his wife Angel Day and their progeny, particularly Will Phantom. Norm has a deep understanding of his country and the sea, and that gives him what appears to be supernatural powers. His communication and interpretation of the dreamtime allows him to navigate and thrive off his country like no other. His ability to use star maps, currents, stories, weather, animals, spirits and all other features of his country make him not just a traditional owner of the land but a guardian and true custodian. His deep understanding leaves all the white folk in town in complete awe of his gifts yet also afraid.

Alongside Norm's journeys and stories are those of his son Will Phantom. A man who seems to have inherited many of Norm's gifts but also a fiery passion to protect his land from the multi-national mining company that is destroying their country. The strange tension created when Norm exiles and disowns his son even though they are philosophically aligned in their love for country and in many ways both commit actions to destroy all foreign intruders is in many ways the central part of the story. It drives both characters willingly or not and Will's actions make him just as much a guardian of the land as his father's perceived inaction does. Although it will later surface in Will's memories that his father has created something even bigger than all of his actions to cleanse the country, wipe out the mining company and indeed the whole town.

The last major character is the prophet and mystic Mozzie Fishman. A man leading an eternal pilgrimage in the form of a roaring Holden Commodore convoy around Australia. Mozzie becomes Will's father figure in many ways and is also ultimately a guardian of the land and its stories. He has a deep mutual respect with Norm, such that when Angel Day takes up with him they still remain strong friends. Mozzie takes in waifs and strays around Australia and dispenses his wisdom to them freely, he is the man of the land, where Norm is the man of the sea.

One of the best comparisons I've read is that this is in many ways Australia's 100 Years of Solitude; it's an accurate comparison. Although, the magic-realism of Marquez is largely fabricated out of imagination, while Wright's magic-realism is grounded firmly in Aboriginal stories and belief. So this is a history of country and culture as much as it is a magic-realist text. It's also a story of trans-generational trauma and how the scars white colonialists have left on the land and the people are passed down in ways they not only can't understand but can't even see or imagine. It's a deeply sad and moving tale. But also a triumphant one and a beautiful journey of discovery. Wright also has a phenomenal ear for the Australian vernacular, putting her up there with Tim Winton and Ruth Park for being the most gifted dialogue writer in Australian story telling. This is a story every Australian should read but not one you would force on people. They need to come to it willingly, ready to learn of the original and best way to look at their great country; a country that lives and breathes. This is the greatest Australian novel I've read.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The sea now a divine limbo under a membrane of whiteness, undecided how to create a new day.

You cannot rightly accuse a man for all of them deaths just on hearsay, without hard evidence, just because he talks to the trees.

2.5/5

My focus on diverse literature, while lofty, has unfortunately enabled some bad habits. The most predominant would be diving willy-nilly to many an unfamiliar visa and persona, any associated ideas running the risk of being a long ways off while the work itself is physically close at hand. I do attempt to mitigate such with a steady flow of nonfic relevant to the fiction's subject, but the latter tends to be more noticeable and easily accessible than the latter. Case in point, when this showed up at a local library, I didn't check myself with a proper treatise on Aboriginal Australians before leaping. IN all honesty, though, there's only so much one can do in terms of one's aesthetic training, and while the difficulty of the text certainly complicated the engagement, I simply didn't jive much with the prose style (blocky and strangely undifferentiated when not in full imaginative flight) and the character portrayals (flat and near allegorical, with women receiving the brunt of the more negative components of such treatment). I do appreciate a good anticolonial tale, though, and the piece started picking up in a tremendous way about 100 pages before the end. Still, getting some sort of payout 350 pages in is a bit much, and when I was cruising in the last few pages towards a three star, the literal final section involving a certain patriarchal archetype and a certain malignantly detailed daughter-in-law sank it back down again.

Just looking, and turning the sunset crimson with their thoughts.

I fully acknowledge the subjectivity of my piss poor reception, and I don't begrudge the author's work and more laudatory treatment of such among others, especially when it comes to literary awards and Nobel laureates for lit. It may simply be the case that I'm not cut out for the Dreamtime style of writing, or if I am, it'll take more than just Wright to engage me. All in all, for reader's looking for an indigenous challenge, this certainly fits the bill. I would've just preferred that the scattered moments of quotable brilliance were more evenly distributed, or at least give some hint of such five pages from the beginning rather than 50 pages before the end.

Looking into the spot where the lines were sinking into the blue-green depths, he saw his companion following, the manta ray with its greying form moving through the depths of ocean below. Norm became intoxicated by watching the prolonged movement of the suspended ray. The creature moved so tantalisingly slowly by suspending itself in the drift of tidal movement. He no longer cared to stay above. His vision slipped into and out of the waters, breaking the surface so many times, he became lost in time.

The mine made killers Will, and now I've made the mine go away. May the great spirit show us some mercy one day, that is all I say.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subject Terms, from my library's database:

Aboriginal Australians -- Fiction.
Indigenous peoples -- Queensland -- Fiction.
Race relations -- Fiction.
Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Fiction.
Mines and mineral resources -- Fiction.

Carpentaria is kind of One Hundred Years of Solitude for people who hated One Hundred Years of Solitude (so: me, I hated it, come at me). I mean, people who like Marquez will also probably like this book, although it's not totally boring so maybe they won't. (Sorry, sorry.)

I know less about Australia than I ought to, probably. Mostly, I know it's terrifying and that Aboriginal Australians have a raw deal. (I have watched some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, but I don't think those are particularly relevant to Australia generally? Definitely not to this book, although there is some murder.) And so I was out of my depth here, in a few places, forgive the pun. (There's a lot of fishing in this book.) I'm usually pretty good at just going with a book and picking up "context clues" - I think because of an adolescence reading fantasy novels out of order - but there are a couple of times where you wonder "is this a racial slur with which I'm unfamiliar? I feel weird Googling it?" Anyway. I wondered, too, if the experience of the book might be better if you were listening to someone reading it aloud. Someone with an Australian accent, I mean. I could tell there were rhythms to the writing that I just wasn't able to access, and I suspect some of that is because of my flat American vowels and internalized uptalk.

Anyway, this is a really difficult book, and that's not a claim I make lightly. And it's not a complaint, either, because I think it's also a really great book, and the difficulty is part of the greatness. But it's still difficult, and not just because of the language. It's very sad. Wright starts it off and you think you know the kind of sad you'll be dealing with, and then you find out you were wrong, it's worse. It's actually more like Deadwood than most of the books on my not-deadwood shelf.

Other stuff it's like: Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things, Thomas Hardy.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Carpentaria” is an incredible novel. The second fictional work from Alexis Wright, it deals with sweeping issues such as the clash of cultures in Australia, the different goals and focuses of whites vs. those of the native Aboriginals; and does so by looking at just one small imaginary town which the author calls Desperance which is located on the very real Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland. The relations between black and white Australia play out on the small stage of Desperance, often in a violent way. The main characters in the novel are from the Phantom family, headed by Norm Phantom, though certainly his son Will is also a key character.

The characters are vivid and believable, the events are at times a bit fantastic, though as the story moves between Dreamtime and reality with a bit of legend and biblical epic mixed in it is sometimes impossible to know just how real the events are supposed to be.
The story is epic in length at over 500 pages, and though takes place in such a remote and small location, it is epic also in the scope as it deals with society on many levels, including business, politics, religion, culture, and law. It is also a book which begs to be read and re-read over and over, as there is so much to take in one can hardly absorb everything it has to say in a single reading.

This book was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, which is Australia’s most prestigious award which is given to a “published novel or play which portrays Australian life in any of its phases.” Alexis Wright is only the second Aboriginal writer to receive the award. Alexis Wright also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction as a result of this novel. That being said, some readers may find difficulty in reading this book. It is not written in a traditional style as characters come and go and side stories seemingly take the reader on journeys which can sometimes leave the reader scratching their head. For myself, I enjoyed this ride, and I believe it is done purposefully to help the reader not focus too much on any particular character, but the larger issues being represented in the story.

[Katey Flowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly am struggling to rate, let alone review this book. It took me almost two weeks to read (at least twice as long as I’d expect to read 500 pages) and I can’t say I enjoyed the reading experience. I ended up both reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook at the same time as I was finding it challenging to get through.

Having said all that, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s dense in a foggy, dreamlike way, and unconventional at every level. It’s non-linear, reading as more of an oral myth than a traditional novel. These characters are harsh and hard, inflicting pain on one another in cycles of collective and intergenerational trauma, intensified by poverty and a new mine bringing both jobs and damage to the town of Desperance.

There are really difficult scenes to read, including abuse of a disabled person, deaths in custody, and racial hate crime. And yet there is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. The magical animistic description on the landscape, the alive ancestors, and the spirit of these larger than life characters… it all results in an undeniably epic tale of devastation, grief, masculinity, family and resilience.

Although it’s so big it almost feels like fantasy, the haunting feeling I’m left with is of the tension that runs throughout the book, and an awareness that it is the same tension that underpins the entirety of ‘Australian’ society. The white fragility, the violence, the fear of retribution for the past, the destruction of land… will we reckon with it willingly?

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a novel set in the fictional town of Desperance in northwestern Queensland, at the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria – hence its name. I’d been wanting to read a book featuring Aboriginal Australians and their cultural myths for many years, but now that I’ve finished its 500 pages, I still can’t identify the narrative thread. After the first couple of chapters, I thought it was more like a collection of short stories, since there is a cast of colourful, potentially memorable characters introduced in a series of discrete, distantly related episodes. Unfortunately, they become lost in a mass of excessive description presented in long, chunky paragraphs packed with ideas that would be delightful if they’d been pared down with the help of an attentive editor to create a better sense of story and pacing. In addition, the author often commits the new writer’s mistake of telling rather than showing, with frequent generalisations about key figures, a habit which makes large parts of the text more banal than engaging, and I had to push myself to work my way through it. After all that, I really don’t think it deserved the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literature prize. As her second novel, Ms Wright is here still finding her literary feet, and the book shows promise for the future – such accolades could certainly be appropriate later in her career. I might give some of her other work a try and see how her style has developed.

[Mentai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexis Wright's text is expansive and flowing, like the wet season that visits the town once a year. It opens in strange, sometimes frustrating ways and travels in slow/fast/slow rhythmic patterns, leading the reader astray. At the end of this book, I felt I'd viscerally experienced the Gulf of Carpentaria in all its weathers, seas, and inland pulses through time.

Reading Carpentaria often reminded me a little of Helene Cixous' notion of feminine ecriture. I thought of where I would like to cite a sentence from a brilliant section I was engaged with but the difficulty was in knowing where to 'cut' or where to unwind the spool. I know of the inappropriateness in referring to a European feminist philosophy of writing as a touch point - - let this say more about me than Wright's extraordinary Aboriginal literary intervention.

As mythic and meandering as her text is, it bursts with moments of realism and layers of plot, which ambiguously resolve towards the end.

Wright also features a rich vocabulary of sound and music entangled with the natural and spiritual. I didn't always understand everything, but I really enjoyed the book.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The defining novel of the first half of 2024 for me. Partially due to it taking me two months to read this, even though I enjoyed my sporadic reading.

I'm moved by Wright's thematic push-and-pull between unity and disunity throughout. Waanyi people feud. White people whine. Nature avenges and destroys. Family ties disband. Business booms and blasts. History and myth pervade. The narrative throughline here proves to be orality; the narrator cannot be considered to follow a "stream-of-consciousness" mode, but their primary method is nonlinearity, an associative method that sounds like a tall tale, an incredibly playful, eloquent friend telling you a digressive story, yet the deepest effect appears to be the omnipresence of myth. The novel diverts weak claims of magical realism and instead operates in a register in which Waanyi myth imbues the natural world with character and characters exist both as human individuals and natural archetypes. There's both distance and intimacy. Wright's voice feels contemporary and timeless. One of the strongest novels of the 21st century thus far. Unironically believe Alexis Wright should be a major Nobel contender.

[kass · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overlong and waterlogged in more ways than one, Wright’s story brims with far too many tangential ideas for even her 500+ pages to contain. The prose isn’t bad and neither are the stories, but the construction of them is hardly comprehensible, and it takes entirely too much effort to try and connect the different tales and characters.