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The Swan Book
The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award. The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright's previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best-seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.
321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2013
193 people are currently reading
4866 people want to read
About the author
Alexis Wright
28 books404 followersAlexis 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 227 reviews
December 14, 2015
This I going to be hard to explain, because I am going to refer to a book with ghosts and alternative, maybe split realities and animals who are sentient and not sentient at the same time and a weird jumping around sense of time and place as a very horrifyingly believable book. It is the most believable sort of gloomy, hope-lacking dystopian book. I don’t think at any point of the book there was a moment of relief from the forlorn situation of the suffering and dehumanised “Oblivia” also sometimes called “Ethyl” or variations on these.
I won’t say I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed the cleverness of some of the connections it drew (hard to see if they were “real” or metaphorical within the “story”, I enjoyed the robustness and complexity of the critical tone of it and the unapologetic Aboriginal anger of it. It seemed to tell me “White reader I don’t give a shit that you are struggling to understand this and you are too dumb to really know what is going on here. I am not going to translate or explain you will have to keep up.” And then my reward for persisting was sadness and guilt. I admired that unapologetic tone of it, it reminded me of the time I tried to learn Ngarindjerri weaving and I was really crap at it (as I am at all textile work) and the auntie teaching me was pretty damn scathing of my ability to even have a go. And in between resenting being put down a bit I had to acknowledge that there was a fair assessment there. It was right of the book to put the deficit on me for not understanding what goes on in my own backyard.
I’m afraid that the way I m reviewing this will put people off reading. And honestly I spent a lot of the book crying with how much I HATED Warren Finch and also feeling despair at people so colonised for so long as the people in the book who lost everything (even in some cases identity or grounding). And yet…not everything. There was a connection to place that I didn’t understand, that failed to console me but perhaps within the epistemology of the book it was a bigger consolation than I can access.
I am saying “epistemology” instead of world-view because it is a big shift, not to a different world (it’s very clearly this real world the book is talking about) not even to just a different view of the world but to a whole different way of allowing yourself to construct a view of the world. Nothing is certain. What the text says might have happened, but will get disputed or contradicted in another part of the book. Ghosts speak, animals act and there are painful silences and emptinesses where truth might have been (if we were going to have a truth based epistemology).
A dead president still has power. A marriage….but you have to read it yourself to understand.
If this is a love story, then the girl’s love is for home and country and swans. I don’t think she ever speaks. I find her situation lonely and desolate but there is little evidence she wants people until fairly late in the book and even then she seems unconvinced. You could say she has PTSD but really the whole country has PTSD (human and physical) in the novel has PTSD then and a dizzying sense of dissociation. The (more or less) privileged are (more or less) blindly pursuing their own denial and the dispossessed hide themselves in the thick impenetrable apathy of the survivor. There are extremes of poverty and suffering in the book and they are human. There are rich, powerful, glamorous compassionless people who seem unreal.
I have met people like that. Sometimes “the beautiful people” seem ugly to me, especially en masse and didn’t Eliot talk about “those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning death”? I can’t pretend to relate to Oblivia, I wonder if she is deliberately unrelatable but I find an honesty and humanity in her unrelatability and her stubborn endurance.
I thought about giving the book less than 5 stars because of how bleak it is, how little hope and agency the victim-people in the book have, how little connection anyone seems to make (except fleetingly in almost-weres). I don’t want to believe that we all despite our best intentions inevitably make things worse for Indigenous Australians. But as I kept reading, the idea of “best intentions” was questioned and questionable.
If I don’t accept the future posited by this book as inevitable what then does it become? A warning? A voicing of dark fears of the author? A plea or demand to be more intentional? I struggled with this book, I found it very difficult. For making me think so damn hard and for not apologising 5 stars!
I won’t say I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed the cleverness of some of the connections it drew (hard to see if they were “real” or metaphorical within the “story”, I enjoyed the robustness and complexity of the critical tone of it and the unapologetic Aboriginal anger of it. It seemed to tell me “White reader I don’t give a shit that you are struggling to understand this and you are too dumb to really know what is going on here. I am not going to translate or explain you will have to keep up.” And then my reward for persisting was sadness and guilt. I admired that unapologetic tone of it, it reminded me of the time I tried to learn Ngarindjerri weaving and I was really crap at it (as I am at all textile work) and the auntie teaching me was pretty damn scathing of my ability to even have a go. And in between resenting being put down a bit I had to acknowledge that there was a fair assessment there. It was right of the book to put the deficit on me for not understanding what goes on in my own backyard.
I’m afraid that the way I m reviewing this will put people off reading. And honestly I spent a lot of the book crying with how much I HATED Warren Finch and also feeling despair at people so colonised for so long as the people in the book who lost everything (even in some cases identity or grounding). And yet…not everything. There was a connection to place that I didn’t understand, that failed to console me but perhaps within the epistemology of the book it was a bigger consolation than I can access.
I am saying “epistemology” instead of world-view because it is a big shift, not to a different world (it’s very clearly this real world the book is talking about) not even to just a different view of the world but to a whole different way of allowing yourself to construct a view of the world. Nothing is certain. What the text says might have happened, but will get disputed or contradicted in another part of the book. Ghosts speak, animals act and there are painful silences and emptinesses where truth might have been (if we were going to have a truth based epistemology).
A dead president still has power. A marriage….but you have to read it yourself to understand.
If this is a love story, then the girl’s love is for home and country and swans. I don’t think she ever speaks. I find her situation lonely and desolate but there is little evidence she wants people until fairly late in the book and even then she seems unconvinced. You could say she has PTSD but really the whole country has PTSD (human and physical) in the novel has PTSD then and a dizzying sense of dissociation. The (more or less) privileged are (more or less) blindly pursuing their own denial and the dispossessed hide themselves in the thick impenetrable apathy of the survivor. There are extremes of poverty and suffering in the book and they are human. There are rich, powerful, glamorous compassionless people who seem unreal.
I have met people like that. Sometimes “the beautiful people” seem ugly to me, especially en masse and didn’t Eliot talk about “those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning death”? I can’t pretend to relate to Oblivia, I wonder if she is deliberately unrelatable but I find an honesty and humanity in her unrelatability and her stubborn endurance.
I thought about giving the book less than 5 stars because of how bleak it is, how little hope and agency the victim-people in the book have, how little connection anyone seems to make (except fleetingly in almost-weres). I don’t want to believe that we all despite our best intentions inevitably make things worse for Indigenous Australians. But as I kept reading, the idea of “best intentions” was questioned and questionable.
If I don’t accept the future posited by this book as inevitable what then does it become? A warning? A voicing of dark fears of the author? A plea or demand to be more intentional? I struggled with this book, I found it very difficult. For making me think so damn hard and for not apologising 5 stars!
July 29, 2016
(I would like to acknowledge that Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation, and that I do not know the story of her country or any other in Australia. I have attempted not to presume too much by reading one novel.)
This is an astonishing novel — a book that I would recommend more highly than I currently rate it, because I don't think it's finished with me yet. This is one of those books that teach you how to read them, and I am a slow learner. So, between passages of brilliant, beautiful writing, I found myself bored. Sometimes even while reading Wright's more wonderful pieces of prose, I found myself bored. But my dissatisfaction with the novel soon turned into dissatisfaction with myself. Why was I bored? My earliest answer was that I was waiting for the 'real story' to begin, but as I progressed deep into the novel, as the characters passed over every chance of having a 'real story', I realised that this wasn't what was unsettling me.
The Swan Book is the story of Oblivion Ethyl(ene). That overdetermined name is the first imposition on her that we learn of. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't know of any other name. How can this be her story if she doesn't even know her name? In fact, though the narrative stays with her throughout, this isn't her story. It can't be. There is no 'her': she has no agency, and, more importantly, (don't be distracted by the Prelude) no subjectivity. This is what made the novel elusive and difficult for me. I kept waiting for her character to resolve, but there is none there. Instead she is inhabited by others, in particular Bella Donna, the Harbour Master, Warren Finch, and the community that allowed her to be raped when she was a child. The story of Oblivia is a complex one, elusive, which will, I think, require careful contemplation.
Certainly, we are being shown how people are not just their own heroically independent wills. In addition to all the human voices, we also hear from spirits, myths, and the land itself. Polyphony and intermixture are important themes in this novel. Peoples and stories and language and environments are all juxtaposed and made hybrid. Through both its Aboriginal realism and its science fictionality, the novel gets a perspective on how changing lands and changing peoples need not undermine the fact that the people are part of the land. Along the way, many trenchant observations are made about the invasion of country and the interventions into traditional lives. But not without humour!
Wright captures the rhythms and ironies of Australian speech better than anyone I've read. That this is not one speech, but many different idioms, and not pure, is one of the keys to her success here. Even more impressive than this linguistic act is how she seamlessly uses this voice to create a modernist narrative. Too often, European modernist techniques seem inhospitable to kangaroos and Canberra and bush cheek. This is a book that, like its characters, has lived all over, but still knows its country.
While I continue to wrestle with Oblivia's story, I will remember many others contained within: the three genies, the street kids, the people smugglers. There's a lot to get from this book; flicking it open to any page reveals riches. Expect to see it on award lists next year.
This is an astonishing novel — a book that I would recommend more highly than I currently rate it, because I don't think it's finished with me yet. This is one of those books that teach you how to read them, and I am a slow learner. So, between passages of brilliant, beautiful writing, I found myself bored. Sometimes even while reading Wright's more wonderful pieces of prose, I found myself bored. But my dissatisfaction with the novel soon turned into dissatisfaction with myself. Why was I bored? My earliest answer was that I was waiting for the 'real story' to begin, but as I progressed deep into the novel, as the characters passed over every chance of having a 'real story', I realised that this wasn't what was unsettling me.
The Swan Book is the story of Oblivion Ethyl(ene). That overdetermined name is the first imposition on her that we learn of. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't know of any other name. How can this be her story if she doesn't even know her name? In fact, though the narrative stays with her throughout, this isn't her story. It can't be. There is no 'her': she has no agency, and, more importantly, (don't be distracted by the Prelude) no subjectivity. This is what made the novel elusive and difficult for me. I kept waiting for her character to resolve, but there is none there. Instead she is inhabited by others, in particular Bella Donna, the Harbour Master, Warren Finch, and the community that allowed her to be raped when she was a child. The story of Oblivia is a complex one, elusive, which will, I think, require careful contemplation.
Certainly, we are being shown how people are not just their own heroically independent wills. In addition to all the human voices, we also hear from spirits, myths, and the land itself. Polyphony and intermixture are important themes in this novel. Peoples and stories and language and environments are all juxtaposed and made hybrid. Through both its Aboriginal realism and its science fictionality, the novel gets a perspective on how changing lands and changing peoples need not undermine the fact that the people are part of the land. Along the way, many trenchant observations are made about the invasion of country and the interventions into traditional lives. But not without humour!
Wright captures the rhythms and ironies of Australian speech better than anyone I've read. That this is not one speech, but many different idioms, and not pure, is one of the keys to her success here. Even more impressive than this linguistic act is how she seamlessly uses this voice to create a modernist narrative. Too often, European modernist techniques seem inhospitable to kangaroos and Canberra and bush cheek. This is a book that, like its characters, has lived all over, but still knows its country.
While I continue to wrestle with Oblivia's story, I will remember many others contained within: the three genies, the street kids, the people smugglers. There's a lot to get from this book; flicking it open to any page reveals riches. Expect to see it on award lists next year.
February 20, 2016
A mess of rambling descriptions, symbolism and mythology that didn't go anywhere and was well above my comprehension levels. The plot description sounded so promising – but for me, this book was just hard work.
September 11, 2013
I have been waiting for this book all my life.
Just wonderful. Real Australian science fiction. Not the Australia of the past 200 years projected into the future, but the Australia of the past 50 000 years projected into the future in a work that is vivid, poetic, incisive, intelligent and memorable.
Just wonderful. Real Australian science fiction. Not the Australia of the past 200 years projected into the future, but the Australia of the past 50 000 years projected into the future in a work that is vivid, poetic, incisive, intelligent and memorable.
June 8, 2014
‘This is the quest to regain sovereignty over my own brain.’
This novel is set in Australia in the future: around the time of the third centenary, in a world fundamentally altered by climate change, and where – following an Army Intervention - Aboriginals are living in a fenced camp alongside a stinking swamp containing the refuse of war.
It follows the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia Ethylene.
Oblivia is the victim of gang rape, who lives on a hulk in a swamp surrounded by rusting boats and thousands of black swans. Oblivia is plucked from this displaced community to be married to Warren Finch, soon to be the first Aboriginal president Australia, and confined to a tower in lawless, flooded southern city.
‘Swans mate for life: that was what she thought.’
And what does the future hold for Oblivia in this novel? Oblivia’s world, with its swans, with its caste of amazing characters such as Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, three genies (Dr Snip Hart, Dr Edgar Mail and Dr Bones Doom) and a talking monkey called Rigoletto. Who defines what is real, and how it impacts on the world? What does it mean to be homeless and dispossessed? In a world drastically turned upside down by climate change, where mass movements of refugees around the world are a consequence of cities drowning, local Aboriginal governments exist alongside high-ranking national Aboriginal politicians.
‘Should angels be eaten, even one, by so many hungry people?’
Oblivia may have been transported to a new world, but she is still part of her old world. The past, present and future are equally important. The swans are an integral part of all aspects of Oblivia’s world. Oblivia may be mute, but her mind is unrestrained. There is both great humour and (at times unexpected) humour in this novel. It is rich in metaphor and full of wonderful storytelling and difficult constructs.
‘A crescent moon moved so low across the swamp that its reflection over rippling water looked like the wings of a magnificent white swan.'
So, what did I make of this book? There is not one definitive conclusion: ‘The Swan Book’ is one of those novels that has made me work hard in order to try to understand it, and will continue to occupy space in my consciousness. Is it about love? About climate change? About dispossession? About myth, culture and reality? ‘The Swan Book’ defines any attempt at simple categorisation, and it is not meant to be read and put aside. I enjoyed it, and I hated it, I laughed and I cried. And above all, I’m thinking.
‘Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
This novel is set in Australia in the future: around the time of the third centenary, in a world fundamentally altered by climate change, and where – following an Army Intervention - Aboriginals are living in a fenced camp alongside a stinking swamp containing the refuse of war.
It follows the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia Ethylene.
Oblivia is the victim of gang rape, who lives on a hulk in a swamp surrounded by rusting boats and thousands of black swans. Oblivia is plucked from this displaced community to be married to Warren Finch, soon to be the first Aboriginal president Australia, and confined to a tower in lawless, flooded southern city.
‘Swans mate for life: that was what she thought.’
And what does the future hold for Oblivia in this novel? Oblivia’s world, with its swans, with its caste of amazing characters such as Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, three genies (Dr Snip Hart, Dr Edgar Mail and Dr Bones Doom) and a talking monkey called Rigoletto. Who defines what is real, and how it impacts on the world? What does it mean to be homeless and dispossessed? In a world drastically turned upside down by climate change, where mass movements of refugees around the world are a consequence of cities drowning, local Aboriginal governments exist alongside high-ranking national Aboriginal politicians.
‘Should angels be eaten, even one, by so many hungry people?’
Oblivia may have been transported to a new world, but she is still part of her old world. The past, present and future are equally important. The swans are an integral part of all aspects of Oblivia’s world. Oblivia may be mute, but her mind is unrestrained. There is both great humour and (at times unexpected) humour in this novel. It is rich in metaphor and full of wonderful storytelling and difficult constructs.
‘A crescent moon moved so low across the swamp that its reflection over rippling water looked like the wings of a magnificent white swan.'
So, what did I make of this book? There is not one definitive conclusion: ‘The Swan Book’ is one of those novels that has made me work hard in order to try to understand it, and will continue to occupy space in my consciousness. Is it about love? About climate change? About dispossession? About myth, culture and reality? ‘The Swan Book’ defines any attempt at simple categorisation, and it is not meant to be read and put aside. I enjoyed it, and I hated it, I laughed and I cried. And above all, I’m thinking.
‘Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
August 19, 2015
Unfortunately I was required to read this book for a university course, so therefore I was not able to simply abandon it like I wanted to every second that I was reading it. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but when did a syntactical jumble of words become "good" writing? I can appreciate that Wright has many important things to say about Australia as a country and the Indigenous people, however I feel as though she could have gotten her point across better and more effectively if she had put down the thesaurus and simply said what she wanted to say. It would have made it a book that I actually wanted to read and wanted to understand, however I was left unfulfilled and confused due to the lack of sense it made. In response to the topics that it covered, the reader should have felt that the story impacted them in some way, shape or form - yet I was left thinking of the author as somewhat pretentious and the book as a waste of time. If you are looking for an Australian novel to read, I feel that there are plenty out there better worth the time and money spent on this book, which is sad considering the severe lack of Indigenous presence and perspective in Australian literature.
May 7, 2021
This is a tough one to review!
The writing was beautiful and the narrative magical (the audiobook had SPECTACULAR narration as well) but the actual plot is peripheral. If you go read the description (which I will not bother reproducing here) you will NOT get a good idea of what the book is about. It is all true, but almost beside the point. The storytelling being the actual point of this book, as far as I can see.
Described as Dystopian, I was expecting an actual dystopia, but the country (Northern Territory? Unnamed Southern city?) and the events are never material, always mythic. The characters are doubly hard to define and nail down; one at least dies, but continues to appear in the main characters world, another may have died as he continues to appear in the same way. Three others vanish - but can the reason they vanish be believed as the person who told the story may or may not exist? The main narrator is clearly an unreliable narrator, but there is no reliability anywhere in the text to use as a standard - so maybe she is, in fact, the ONLY reliable narrator?
Once I got my head around the fact that nothing was concrete I really loved this slow winding, gritty narrative. The audiobook helped immensely with this, it gave the story a cadence and a material presence that I struggled to provide initially with the reading voice inside my head, but once I got the rhythm it all fell into place. I have always loved Dreamtime stories, and they are better told than read so after a while I settled into the fact that this was basically a Dreamtime, in which people flying, or ascending into the sky to become stars, or continuing a journey after death need to be accepted 'just so' and 'just because'.
The writing was beautiful and the narrative magical (the audiobook had SPECTACULAR narration as well) but the actual plot is peripheral. If you go read the description (which I will not bother reproducing here) you will NOT get a good idea of what the book is about. It is all true, but almost beside the point. The storytelling being the actual point of this book, as far as I can see.
Described as Dystopian, I was expecting an actual dystopia, but the country (Northern Territory? Unnamed Southern city?) and the events are never material, always mythic. The characters are doubly hard to define and nail down; one at least dies, but continues to appear in the main characters world, another may have died as he continues to appear in the same way. Three others vanish - but can the reason they vanish be believed as the person who told the story may or may not exist? The main narrator is clearly an unreliable narrator, but there is no reliability anywhere in the text to use as a standard - so maybe she is, in fact, the ONLY reliable narrator?
Once I got my head around the fact that nothing was concrete I really loved this slow winding, gritty narrative. The audiobook helped immensely with this, it gave the story a cadence and a material presence that I struggled to provide initially with the reading voice inside my head, but once I got the rhythm it all fell into place. I have always loved Dreamtime stories, and they are better told than read so after a while I settled into the fact that this was basically a Dreamtime, in which people flying, or ascending into the sky to become stars, or continuing a journey after death need to be accepted 'just so' and 'just because'.
May 16, 2016
Beutiful writing, zero plot. Not for me.
January 20, 2016
Get set for a wild ride with Alexis Wright’s new novel, The Swan Book! It’s exhilarating, confronting, funny, touching, angry, wise and unforgettable.
I am mildly worried that perhaps I should have re-read it in its entirety more than once before tackling writing about it, because I suspect that repeated readings will reveal all kinds of aspects that I’ve missed or misunderstood. Indeed, I kept thinking of James Joyce’s Ulysses as I read: it has the promise of the same kind of riches that reveal themselves the more times you read it. There are allusions and allegories all over the place, myths I recognise and those I don’t, circularities that seem to get lost but perhaps I missed the route, and so on. But you’re not here at ANZ LitLovers to see what an expert makes of a book like this, you’re here to see what an ordinary, interested reader discovers. So with that caveat, read on.
It’s not a book that you read to find out what happens, though what happens is fascinating. The Swan Book is set in a dystopian future where climate change has altered everything. This in itself if confronting, because a dystopian future conjures up all kinds of hideous scenarios, all of them involving radical, frightening social change as in The Handmaid’s Tale or The Road. But by leaving in place the Northern Territory Intervention and various other social engineering policies that apply only to our First Peoples, Alexis Wright’s novel shows us only too vividly that Australia’s Aborigines are already living a dystopian future: non-indigenous readers have to get used to trenchant criticism very early on in this book, and there is no let up though it’s often delivered with the black humour that seems to be a distinctive feature of Black writing in Australia. Don’t read it if you’re not prepared to wear it. The more you think you might not like this, the more important it probably is that you read it.
The central character is Oblivia. She doesn’t say a word throughout the novel because she is traumatised, the victim of gang rape by a bunch of petrol-sniffing youths. She also symbolises the way Aboriginal people have been silenced since the European invasion because even when they speak no one listens. This is most graphically depicted in the blackest of black humour scenes towards the end of the novel when nobody listens to the elders who try to end the farce of endless grief-as-public-spectacle á la Princess Diana.
To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/09/22/th...
I am mildly worried that perhaps I should have re-read it in its entirety more than once before tackling writing about it, because I suspect that repeated readings will reveal all kinds of aspects that I’ve missed or misunderstood. Indeed, I kept thinking of James Joyce’s Ulysses as I read: it has the promise of the same kind of riches that reveal themselves the more times you read it. There are allusions and allegories all over the place, myths I recognise and those I don’t, circularities that seem to get lost but perhaps I missed the route, and so on. But you’re not here at ANZ LitLovers to see what an expert makes of a book like this, you’re here to see what an ordinary, interested reader discovers. So with that caveat, read on.
It’s not a book that you read to find out what happens, though what happens is fascinating. The Swan Book is set in a dystopian future where climate change has altered everything. This in itself if confronting, because a dystopian future conjures up all kinds of hideous scenarios, all of them involving radical, frightening social change as in The Handmaid’s Tale or The Road. But by leaving in place the Northern Territory Intervention and various other social engineering policies that apply only to our First Peoples, Alexis Wright’s novel shows us only too vividly that Australia’s Aborigines are already living a dystopian future: non-indigenous readers have to get used to trenchant criticism very early on in this book, and there is no let up though it’s often delivered with the black humour that seems to be a distinctive feature of Black writing in Australia. Don’t read it if you’re not prepared to wear it. The more you think you might not like this, the more important it probably is that you read it.
The central character is Oblivia. She doesn’t say a word throughout the novel because she is traumatised, the victim of gang rape by a bunch of petrol-sniffing youths. She also symbolises the way Aboriginal people have been silenced since the European invasion because even when they speak no one listens. This is most graphically depicted in the blackest of black humour scenes towards the end of the novel when nobody listens to the elders who try to end the farce of endless grief-as-public-spectacle á la Princess Diana.
To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/09/22/th...
February 26, 2014
I'm not sure I can really review this book fairly as I'm pretty sure that a lot of what is going on here passed me by. There's some glorious language, some snippets of blistering satire and the bones of a richly allegorical novel here, but it's swamped by cultural references that I mostly missed, shifts in tone that left me baffled rather than engaged and a kind of stream of conscious approach that overwhelmed me. I got a lot out of Wright's previous book (Carpenteria), but here I think she's kicked it up a notch and left me floundering in her wake.
September 19, 2013
I really wanted to love this book. It has all the elements I'm interested in, but the writing is just terrible. I've noticed since moving to Northern Australia that a lot of people up here only read a few words from every sentence, and assume that they know what comes in between. This book is written in that way. If you just skim the words, you get a feel for what the author's trying to say. If you actually read all of the words, you find that they're often the opposite of the author's intended meaning.
If you're going to go with purple prose, it pays to have a much more solid grip on the English language than this.
[I gave up at 16%, and every single sentence of it was painful]
If you're going to go with purple prose, it pays to have a much more solid grip on the English language than this.
[I gave up at 16%, and every single sentence of it was painful]
April 7, 2025
Best Character Award goes to Rigoletto the monkey.
Runner-Up goes to Bella Donna.
With an Honourable Mention to the three genies.
Runner-Up goes to Bella Donna.
With an Honourable Mention to the three genies.
August 31, 2021
“If you leave here, you know what is going to happen don’t you? People are going to stop and stare at you the very instant they see the colour of your skin, and they will say: She is one of those wild Aboriginals from up North, a terrorist; they will say you are one of those faces kept in the Federal Government’s Book of Suspects."
It is a book that shows us the gloomy future of Australian Aboriginal peoples. It was a difficult reading experience as there are many descriptions and not so many events that move the plot. The main character is Oblivia and she doesn`t speak as the result of being gang-raped as a child. We follow her thoughts and all the things that are going on in her head. And there are a lot!!! She lives inside her head and we see all the thoughts and dialogues that take place in her head. Sometimes I couldn`t understand whether it is happening for real or if it is all in her head.
At first, I didn`t enjoy reading this at all but the second part of the book got better. There are a lot of descriptions and symbolism, so if you are not into it, I wouldn`t recommend reading this book.
However, if you know the background of the novel and why it was written (anti-Intervention) it is quite an interesting read. The book shows that the Intervention is still in progress and the military controls the lives of Aboriginal people.
2 stars
It is a book that shows us the gloomy future of Australian Aboriginal peoples. It was a difficult reading experience as there are many descriptions and not so many events that move the plot. The main character is Oblivia and she doesn`t speak as the result of being gang-raped as a child. We follow her thoughts and all the things that are going on in her head. And there are a lot!!! She lives inside her head and we see all the thoughts and dialogues that take place in her head. Sometimes I couldn`t understand whether it is happening for real or if it is all in her head.
At first, I didn`t enjoy reading this at all but the second part of the book got better. There are a lot of descriptions and symbolism, so if you are not into it, I wouldn`t recommend reading this book.
However, if you know the background of the novel and why it was written (anti-Intervention) it is quite an interesting read. The book shows that the Intervention is still in progress and the military controls the lives of Aboriginal people.
2 stars
March 24, 2017
I've just finished this. I must have read hundreds of books over the last 50 years and haven't been so blown away since Titus Groan (Mervyn Peake). Not merely outstanding, this slotted into my top ten before I'd finished the opening.
I don't know where to start except to suggest that, if the opening doesn't grab you, you'd best put the book down. It's not going to be watered down anywhere.
Superbly lyrical and bold, you're walking through a surreal landscape - and yet it is so real. This is a world in which logic and cause and effect play second place to reality.
I'm still spellbound - and that will be permanent.
I don't know where to start except to suggest that, if the opening doesn't grab you, you'd best put the book down. It's not going to be watered down anywhere.
Superbly lyrical and bold, you're walking through a surreal landscape - and yet it is so real. This is a world in which logic and cause and effect play second place to reality.
I'm still spellbound - and that will be permanent.
March 11, 2015
I won't pretend I fully understood everything, but there was a beautiful rhythm to the lyrical prose. It was funny and intense and sharp. It felt really politically astute, too -- Tony Abbott's comments about lifestyle choices could easily have fitted in this novel. It took a long time to read because I needed to give it my full attention and read it chapter by chapter-- not a few pages here and there, and not when I was tired or distracted.
August 20, 2016
Originally published at Risingshadow.
Alexis Wright's The Swan Book is a significant addition to literary speculative fiction. It's a genre-bending masterpiece of evocative prose and powerful imagery that blends ancient myths and legends in a powerful and thought-provoking way. It's a novel that has both style and substance.
The Swan Book was originally published in Australia in 2013 and later in Great Britain in 2015. It's great that Atria Books has published it in the USA and expanded its market area, because it's a novel that deserves more publicity due to its contents.
The events in The Swan Book take place in the future around the time of Australia's third centenary. The world has been fundamentally altered by climate change and many things have changed - towns have been closed, cities have been boarded up and communities have been abandoned. The world has been ravaged by floods, droughts, fires and blizzards. It's a world where Aboriginal people are living in a fenced and army-controlled detention camp where a contaminated swamp rules the landscape.
The protagonist is called Oblivia Ethelyne. She was given this name by an old woman, Bella Donna of the Champions, who found her from the bowels of an old eucalyptus tree. The old woman took Oblivia to live with her in a polluted dry swamp that is fenced off the the rest of the world by the army.
Oblivia has been through a lot and her life has not been easy. She is mute and has been traumatised, because she is a victim of gangrape. She can make only a few sounds, but she has a brilliant mind. She lives in an old hulk on the swamp. Her accommodation is surrounded by black swans and rusting and rotting boats that litter the swamp.
The author follows Oblivia's life in an engaging way. Oblivia's unique voice is a pleasure to read, because the way she thinks about the world and the happenings around her has a bittersweet edge to it that is lacking from many novels. Not only does the author follow Oblivia's life, but she also writes about Warren Finch's life and fleshes out his thoughts and reveals things about him.
The cast of characters is captivatingly strange and versatile. Reading about Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Warren Finch, a talking monkey and the genies with doctorates was fascinating for me. Bella Donna is a European climate refugee who has come to Australia. Warren Finch is an interesting man, because he has been educated by Aboriginal customs and becomes a political leader, a president.
The author writes beautifully about the swans and how they are a guiding presence to Oblivia. The swans are an important part of Oblivia's world.
Alexis Wright writes rich, descriptive and poetic prose that sparkles with nuances. Her beautiful prose is rich with bittersweetness, metaphors and symbolism. In my opinion, her narrative skills are superior to many authors, because she dares to blend various elements and experiments with certain things. She creates a heartbreaking narrative that examines the fate and culture of Australia's indigenous people in a touching way.
One of the most important reasons why The Swan Book stands out among others of its kind is that Alexis Wright writes well about Aboriginals. It is not often that readers have an opportunity to read about Aboriginals and their culture in such a rich and powerful way.
I think it's great how fluently and deeply the author explores the harsh realities and difficult situations that Aboriginal people have to face. Her way of writing about Aboriginals and their way of life cuts straight to the reader's heart, because she doesn't shy away from challenging and difficult material. I think that most readers have heard of what has happened to Aboriginals over the years and how badly some of them have been treated, so the happenings will have an emotional impact on many readers.
By blending realism with fantastical elements Alexis Wright is able to write about delicate issues in an original and inventive way. This novel is a prime example of how well a talented author can write about almost anything by means of speculative fiction, because speculative fiction allows authors freedom to explore difficult and painful issues in a striking and memorable way.
Worldbuilding is excellent, because the author delivers a bleak vision of a changed world. As a fan of dystopian science fiction, I enjoyed reading about how everything had changed and how it effected people.
Because The Swan Book is not an easy novel, it is not for hasty readers who rush through stories and never stop to think about what they've just read. It may not be for everyone, because it has been written for thinking adults. It's a novel that rewards its readers with a rich tale that has plenty of depth and layers, because underneath the beautiful prose lies a wealth of depth and raw emotion.
I was amazed at the quantity of various elements, because the author has added elements of magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, satire and politics etc to her story. I also marvelled at the author's ability to use stream of consciousness kind of narrative along with normal narrative mode.
I took my time reading this novel and I'm glad that I did so. If I had read it faster, I probably would've missed out on a lot of important elements and hidden meanings, because the text is filled with depth and thoughtfulness. In my opinion, this novel benefits from thoughtful reading, because it has the power to make you think about the world and people around you. The more you think about what you've just read, the more you'll enjoy the story.
When I began to read this novel, Alexis Wright's evocative and rich writing style immediately impressed me. Her use of expressions and language felt refreshingly vivid. I loved her way of writing about Oblivia and her extraordinary life. She wrote so well about Oblivia, her life and her feelings that I found myself being wholly spellbound by the unfolding story.
I think that readers who are familiar with the works of Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell will be pleased to read this novel and will devour it as fast as possible. This may sound a bit exotic and strange, but this novel reads a bit like a blend of Atwoodian dystopian science fiction and Mitchellian originality with a dash of harsh and unyielding realism. It also has a touch of the slightly experimental storytelling and narrative technique found in Tom McCarthy's C.
I give The Swan Book full five stars on the scale from one to five stars, because it's a literary masterpiece. I was deeply impressed by the story, because it's been a while since I've read anything as rich and thoughtful as it.
Alexis Wright's The Swan Book should be read by everyone who loves literary speculative fiction and beautifully written literary fiction. It's a fascinating combination of sparkling imagination, compelling storytelling and good prose.
Highly recommended!
Alexis Wright's The Swan Book is a significant addition to literary speculative fiction. It's a genre-bending masterpiece of evocative prose and powerful imagery that blends ancient myths and legends in a powerful and thought-provoking way. It's a novel that has both style and substance.
The Swan Book was originally published in Australia in 2013 and later in Great Britain in 2015. It's great that Atria Books has published it in the USA and expanded its market area, because it's a novel that deserves more publicity due to its contents.
The events in The Swan Book take place in the future around the time of Australia's third centenary. The world has been fundamentally altered by climate change and many things have changed - towns have been closed, cities have been boarded up and communities have been abandoned. The world has been ravaged by floods, droughts, fires and blizzards. It's a world where Aboriginal people are living in a fenced and army-controlled detention camp where a contaminated swamp rules the landscape.
The protagonist is called Oblivia Ethelyne. She was given this name by an old woman, Bella Donna of the Champions, who found her from the bowels of an old eucalyptus tree. The old woman took Oblivia to live with her in a polluted dry swamp that is fenced off the the rest of the world by the army.
Oblivia has been through a lot and her life has not been easy. She is mute and has been traumatised, because she is a victim of gangrape. She can make only a few sounds, but she has a brilliant mind. She lives in an old hulk on the swamp. Her accommodation is surrounded by black swans and rusting and rotting boats that litter the swamp.
The author follows Oblivia's life in an engaging way. Oblivia's unique voice is a pleasure to read, because the way she thinks about the world and the happenings around her has a bittersweet edge to it that is lacking from many novels. Not only does the author follow Oblivia's life, but she also writes about Warren Finch's life and fleshes out his thoughts and reveals things about him.
The cast of characters is captivatingly strange and versatile. Reading about Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Warren Finch, a talking monkey and the genies with doctorates was fascinating for me. Bella Donna is a European climate refugee who has come to Australia. Warren Finch is an interesting man, because he has been educated by Aboriginal customs and becomes a political leader, a president.
The author writes beautifully about the swans and how they are a guiding presence to Oblivia. The swans are an important part of Oblivia's world.
Alexis Wright writes rich, descriptive and poetic prose that sparkles with nuances. Her beautiful prose is rich with bittersweetness, metaphors and symbolism. In my opinion, her narrative skills are superior to many authors, because she dares to blend various elements and experiments with certain things. She creates a heartbreaking narrative that examines the fate and culture of Australia's indigenous people in a touching way.
One of the most important reasons why The Swan Book stands out among others of its kind is that Alexis Wright writes well about Aboriginals. It is not often that readers have an opportunity to read about Aboriginals and their culture in such a rich and powerful way.
I think it's great how fluently and deeply the author explores the harsh realities and difficult situations that Aboriginal people have to face. Her way of writing about Aboriginals and their way of life cuts straight to the reader's heart, because she doesn't shy away from challenging and difficult material. I think that most readers have heard of what has happened to Aboriginals over the years and how badly some of them have been treated, so the happenings will have an emotional impact on many readers.
By blending realism with fantastical elements Alexis Wright is able to write about delicate issues in an original and inventive way. This novel is a prime example of how well a talented author can write about almost anything by means of speculative fiction, because speculative fiction allows authors freedom to explore difficult and painful issues in a striking and memorable way.
Worldbuilding is excellent, because the author delivers a bleak vision of a changed world. As a fan of dystopian science fiction, I enjoyed reading about how everything had changed and how it effected people.
Because The Swan Book is not an easy novel, it is not for hasty readers who rush through stories and never stop to think about what they've just read. It may not be for everyone, because it has been written for thinking adults. It's a novel that rewards its readers with a rich tale that has plenty of depth and layers, because underneath the beautiful prose lies a wealth of depth and raw emotion.
I was amazed at the quantity of various elements, because the author has added elements of magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, satire and politics etc to her story. I also marvelled at the author's ability to use stream of consciousness kind of narrative along with normal narrative mode.
I took my time reading this novel and I'm glad that I did so. If I had read it faster, I probably would've missed out on a lot of important elements and hidden meanings, because the text is filled with depth and thoughtfulness. In my opinion, this novel benefits from thoughtful reading, because it has the power to make you think about the world and people around you. The more you think about what you've just read, the more you'll enjoy the story.
When I began to read this novel, Alexis Wright's evocative and rich writing style immediately impressed me. Her use of expressions and language felt refreshingly vivid. I loved her way of writing about Oblivia and her extraordinary life. She wrote so well about Oblivia, her life and her feelings that I found myself being wholly spellbound by the unfolding story.
I think that readers who are familiar with the works of Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell will be pleased to read this novel and will devour it as fast as possible. This may sound a bit exotic and strange, but this novel reads a bit like a blend of Atwoodian dystopian science fiction and Mitchellian originality with a dash of harsh and unyielding realism. It also has a touch of the slightly experimental storytelling and narrative technique found in Tom McCarthy's C.
I give The Swan Book full five stars on the scale from one to five stars, because it's a literary masterpiece. I was deeply impressed by the story, because it's been a while since I've read anything as rich and thoughtful as it.
Alexis Wright's The Swan Book should be read by everyone who loves literary speculative fiction and beautifully written literary fiction. It's a fascinating combination of sparkling imagination, compelling storytelling and good prose.
Highly recommended!
September 22, 2021
If nothing else, this is one of the most original books I've read. Original and - as the below reviews indicate - absolutely bizarre. In fact, fair to say that if you don't like strange books, this might not be for you. It's not accurate to call this dystopian or magical realist, though it incorporates elements of both. Rather, it takes these genres to their (i)logical conclusion – stretching them until the world of the novel no longer resembles anything we recognise.
Oblivia is rescued by Bella Donna of the Champions and the two of them come to live in the rusting hulk of a warship in the middle of a polluted swamp filled with thousands of black swans. We're in a post globally warmed world and there is pretty rarely anything 'natural' to be found anywhere in the world: everything is either brittle, rusted or slicked with nuclear waste. The community that live around the edge of the swamp and all starving, malnourished, and coated in dust from the dry earth. Oblivia is plucked from this world and taken to an equally phantasmagorical cityscape to be the wife of the president of Australia. Throughout the story, Oblivia seems to alternate between terrified and traumatised, and we receive this ugly, hostile world through her eyes.
Summarising the narrative wont really give curious readers much to go by. The book's main action is so hallucinatory it takes a back seat to the grotesque imagery that makes up most of Wright's novel. Imagery magpied from across time, low and high culture pastiched: Wagnerian Opera and Slim Dusty; Brolgas and Odysseus; Indigenous slang and latin. The detritus of history. In this way, there doesn't seem to be any distinction between what the protagonist believes or imagines and the action of the story. Most of the time, this is great. Reading scenes in which three Genies with PHDs in Ontology, Hagiography and Oology walking through the bush collecting and cataloguing grass owl eggs at midnight and thinking – not without pleasure – 'what the bloody hell am I reading here'?
All this leaves the reader with some niggling questions. Is this purely a flight of fancy? Or is it some sort of allegory? It often feels like there is something profound shimmering just below the surface and it can be frustrating trying to hold the writing up to the light to try and divine some meaning from between the words. Was this misplaced? Is trying to divine a 'regular' narrative from this book just applying Eurocentric methods of interpretation to what seems to be an anti-European book? Perhaps these questions are just the point.
In any case, I enjoyed this great book more when I stopped trying to make it make sense and just let it wash over me and letting its "meaning" lie outside my grip. What that meaning might be, I sure as hell can't tell you, perhaps it's intangible, but I feel closer to some untamed, crazy truth having read this book.
Oblivia is rescued by Bella Donna of the Champions and the two of them come to live in the rusting hulk of a warship in the middle of a polluted swamp filled with thousands of black swans. We're in a post globally warmed world and there is pretty rarely anything 'natural' to be found anywhere in the world: everything is either brittle, rusted or slicked with nuclear waste. The community that live around the edge of the swamp and all starving, malnourished, and coated in dust from the dry earth. Oblivia is plucked from this world and taken to an equally phantasmagorical cityscape to be the wife of the president of Australia. Throughout the story, Oblivia seems to alternate between terrified and traumatised, and we receive this ugly, hostile world through her eyes.
Summarising the narrative wont really give curious readers much to go by. The book's main action is so hallucinatory it takes a back seat to the grotesque imagery that makes up most of Wright's novel. Imagery magpied from across time, low and high culture pastiched: Wagnerian Opera and Slim Dusty; Brolgas and Odysseus; Indigenous slang and latin. The detritus of history. In this way, there doesn't seem to be any distinction between what the protagonist believes or imagines and the action of the story. Most of the time, this is great. Reading scenes in which three Genies with PHDs in Ontology, Hagiography and Oology walking through the bush collecting and cataloguing grass owl eggs at midnight and thinking – not without pleasure – 'what the bloody hell am I reading here'?
All this leaves the reader with some niggling questions. Is this purely a flight of fancy? Or is it some sort of allegory? It often feels like there is something profound shimmering just below the surface and it can be frustrating trying to hold the writing up to the light to try and divine some meaning from between the words. Was this misplaced? Is trying to divine a 'regular' narrative from this book just applying Eurocentric methods of interpretation to what seems to be an anti-European book? Perhaps these questions are just the point.
In any case, I enjoyed this great book more when I stopped trying to make it make sense and just let it wash over me and letting its "meaning" lie outside my grip. What that meaning might be, I sure as hell can't tell you, perhaps it's intangible, but I feel closer to some untamed, crazy truth having read this book.
March 24, 2016
This is a brilliant book.
It's political - telling the story of various Australian governments and the general arrogance and ignorance shown towards Aborigines.
It's a love story - between Oblivia, Swans and the land.
It's about language - Alexis Wright effortlessly uses a variety of English, Aborigine, Latin. French, common speak and in the words of business and politicians.
It's science fiction - based in 100 years time after climate change and various wars have created a world of nomadic people.
It's about climate change - more than anything this book tells us to listen to nature, make the changes needed to sustain our world and stop being focused on consumerism, celebs and three word slogans.
There is wisdom in the Aboriginal community, we need to listen to them.
It's political - telling the story of various Australian governments and the general arrogance and ignorance shown towards Aborigines.
It's a love story - between Oblivia, Swans and the land.
It's about language - Alexis Wright effortlessly uses a variety of English, Aborigine, Latin. French, common speak and in the words of business and politicians.
It's science fiction - based in 100 years time after climate change and various wars have created a world of nomadic people.
It's about climate change - more than anything this book tells us to listen to nature, make the changes needed to sustain our world and stop being focused on consumerism, celebs and three word slogans.
There is wisdom in the Aboriginal community, we need to listen to them.
March 30, 2018
The Swan Book is set in a future Australia ravaged by climate change. Like sci-fi worlds of a similar vein - Oryx & Crake / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - the confronting power of the novel rests in knowing that elements of this dystopian nightmare will come to pass, or have already come to pass. The social and political truths embedded in the narrative, such as the ongoing impact of colonisation on the Aboriginal people of Australia, add a deeper layer of chilling intensity to Wright's beautiful, haunting prose.
I found hope present in the narrative. External touchstones may be destroyed by natural disaster or for "political good", but spiritual bonds cannot be erased so easily.
The Swan Book will linger in my mind...
I found hope present in the narrative. External touchstones may be destroyed by natural disaster or for "political good", but spiritual bonds cannot be erased so easily.
The Swan Book will linger in my mind...
January 31, 2015
4.5 stars.
Getting through this book was hard work. It's myth and folklore and reality. It's written in English and Waanyi and Latin, and the rules of grammar and syntax are broken at will. It's confronting. It's farcical. It's despairing. It's angry. It's a piss-take. It's future-set but so very current.
This novel challenged me as a reader, as an Australian, as a human being.
Getting through this book was hard work. It's myth and folklore and reality. It's written in English and Waanyi and Latin, and the rules of grammar and syntax are broken at will. It's confronting. It's farcical. It's despairing. It's angry. It's a piss-take. It's future-set but so very current.
This novel challenged me as a reader, as an Australian, as a human being.
September 21, 2017
Baffling. Utterly Baffling.
I don't know what I just read... but I gave up after 75 pages. I kept reading the blurb in the hopes of figuring out if there was a plot. I couldn't find one... I just found a headache from the questionable grammar.
Which is a pity because I really want to support more Australian authors and particularly indigenous authors. But I can't lie. I hated it.
I don't know what I just read... but I gave up after 75 pages. I kept reading the blurb in the hopes of figuring out if there was a plot. I couldn't find one... I just found a headache from the questionable grammar.
Which is a pity because I really want to support more Australian authors and particularly indigenous authors. But I can't lie. I hated it.
August 4, 2017
Hands down the finest novel I've read in 2014. Deeply original, and the language is just so beautiful. Words you can sink into, words you can dream about. Climate change and swan stories and race relations in future Australia. Dense and ambiguous and challenging. I was sorry when it ended.
Read
November 12, 2017I can't read it. I've tried. I've tried the paper book. Abandoned. So I've tried the audio book, abandoned and actually annoyed by it.
I am sorry. I have had this in my list for a while. I have loved many of the authors books before. But
This one is either not for me or the wrong time.
I am sorry. I have had this in my list for a while. I have loved many of the authors books before. But
This one is either not for me or the wrong time.
July 20, 2019
I know this has won awards, but this just didn't work for me at all. It's a combination of the rambling purple prose, the minimal plot, and losing interest in the characters very early on in the book.
Read
May 10, 2015Well, I've finished! And right now I have NO idea how to rate this! Hopefully more thoughts to follow.
April 29, 2017
The Swan Book is a difficult read. There are metaphors within metaphors, literary references referring back to various cultures and ages.
Broadly, The Swan Book follows the life of an Aboriginal girl, Oblivia Ethyl(ene) Oblivion. Oblivia is rescued as a child from a hollow treetrunk and grows up living in the hull of a ship in a semi-dried lake, being raised by a white woman, Bella Donna. The community seems to be a mixture of exiled aborigines, deemed troublesome by the authorities, and migrants fleeing the effects of climate change around the world. One day, swans come to the lake. The swans seem to be a metaphor for different aboriginal nations, and Oblivia seems to be a cipher for aboriginal consciousness. She is distant from her community and spends much of her time in a dream-like state.
Then, one day, the lake is visited by Warren Finch, an aboriginal politician who has become vice president of Australia. Finch appears to be revered by mainstream society as the acceptable, approachable face of aboriginal culture. The trouble is, Oblivia and the swans can't recognise him at all. Finch claims Oblivia as his promised wife and takes her away to his home in the city where she spends half her time playing the role of Australia's first lady, and half her time effectively held prisoner by Finch's loyal man-servant Machine.
The book considers questions of Aboriginal identity, assimilation and self government. Some of the conclusions seem to be pretty bleak; a people brought up on welfare handouts who are unwilling to engage with the mainstream; yet who have been robbed of the skills, culture and freedom to engage in real self-determination. There are close parallels between The Swan Book and Irish legend. Indeed, the text references the Children of Lir - children who were turned into swans and condemned to stay that way for 900 years - as a story passed to Oblivia by Bella Donna. Opening this parallel to Irish legend opens the way to seeing successive waves of settlers on the land. Hence, if the swans are the Tuatha Dé Danann, Oblivia and her people would be the Fir Bolg, and before them was the origin of the lake under the Nemedians.
Alexis Wright doesn't seem to offer any way forward (and why should she?), but if the Irish legend analogy is followed through, we would remember that the Tuatha Dé Danann were displaced by the final wave of invaders, the Milesians. Is this an indication that the aboriginals are fighting a doomed battle for survival?
The political messages are made more powerful for their cloaking in legend and analogy. The reader has to reach his or her own conclusions, and perhaps each reader will reach different conclusions. This reader, as a relatively recent European migrant to Australia, may impose a different set of cultural values and expectations on the text to those readers who pick up on other textual references. Because, for all the swans, there are other birds. We have brolgas, we have currawongs, we have mynahs and we have Warren Finch. In many of the scenes, the birds have at least equal status to the people. This is certainly not a book that celebrates man's achievements and where cities and aeroplanes and lorries are mentioned, they are depicted very much as pollutants that are small blemishes to a much bigger, older and wiser land.
The heavy metaphor, use of dream sequences, absurdity and surreality make this a difficult book. The reader feels as though he or she is seeing just a small part of the full depth of this work. And it leaves a sense of unease with the accepted values and direction of society. But it is worth persevering with, even if much of the pleasure comes from having reached the end rather than the process of reaching it.
Broadly, The Swan Book follows the life of an Aboriginal girl, Oblivia Ethyl(ene) Oblivion. Oblivia is rescued as a child from a hollow treetrunk and grows up living in the hull of a ship in a semi-dried lake, being raised by a white woman, Bella Donna. The community seems to be a mixture of exiled aborigines, deemed troublesome by the authorities, and migrants fleeing the effects of climate change around the world. One day, swans come to the lake. The swans seem to be a metaphor for different aboriginal nations, and Oblivia seems to be a cipher for aboriginal consciousness. She is distant from her community and spends much of her time in a dream-like state.
Then, one day, the lake is visited by Warren Finch, an aboriginal politician who has become vice president of Australia. Finch appears to be revered by mainstream society as the acceptable, approachable face of aboriginal culture. The trouble is, Oblivia and the swans can't recognise him at all. Finch claims Oblivia as his promised wife and takes her away to his home in the city where she spends half her time playing the role of Australia's first lady, and half her time effectively held prisoner by Finch's loyal man-servant Machine.
The book considers questions of Aboriginal identity, assimilation and self government. Some of the conclusions seem to be pretty bleak; a people brought up on welfare handouts who are unwilling to engage with the mainstream; yet who have been robbed of the skills, culture and freedom to engage in real self-determination. There are close parallels between The Swan Book and Irish legend. Indeed, the text references the Children of Lir - children who were turned into swans and condemned to stay that way for 900 years - as a story passed to Oblivia by Bella Donna. Opening this parallel to Irish legend opens the way to seeing successive waves of settlers on the land. Hence, if the swans are the Tuatha Dé Danann, Oblivia and her people would be the Fir Bolg, and before them was the origin of the lake under the Nemedians.
Alexis Wright doesn't seem to offer any way forward (and why should she?), but if the Irish legend analogy is followed through, we would remember that the Tuatha Dé Danann were displaced by the final wave of invaders, the Milesians. Is this an indication that the aboriginals are fighting a doomed battle for survival?
The political messages are made more powerful for their cloaking in legend and analogy. The reader has to reach his or her own conclusions, and perhaps each reader will reach different conclusions. This reader, as a relatively recent European migrant to Australia, may impose a different set of cultural values and expectations on the text to those readers who pick up on other textual references. Because, for all the swans, there are other birds. We have brolgas, we have currawongs, we have mynahs and we have Warren Finch. In many of the scenes, the birds have at least equal status to the people. This is certainly not a book that celebrates man's achievements and where cities and aeroplanes and lorries are mentioned, they are depicted very much as pollutants that are small blemishes to a much bigger, older and wiser land.
The heavy metaphor, use of dream sequences, absurdity and surreality make this a difficult book. The reader feels as though he or she is seeing just a small part of the full depth of this work. And it leaves a sense of unease with the accepted values and direction of society. But it is worth persevering with, even if much of the pleasure comes from having reached the end rather than the process of reaching it.
June 13, 2016
I'm so sorry Alexis Wright. As much as I love your richly detailed writing, this book is far too dense for me and my totally fried brain to process right now. Maybe when my life is a little less hectic with uni/assignments and I have much more time to devote myself to it.
Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kond of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden teinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out of the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notuces stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarm of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomitimg bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.
Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.
This book fills me with guilt because despite the fragments of evocative and beautifully written prose (as shown with the aforementiomed excerpts), I... just could not get into it. It's a book I believe that needs several readings and time/patience to unpack all the meaning in its heavily metaphorical and intertextual writing in order to fully enjoy it. I wish I could say I liked the book, but I think I just appreciated/respected what the book is clearly trying to talk about (e.g. Australia and its history of being *the worst* with the Aborigines, climate change, sense of displacement and belonging, etc) than I did enjoy it. Oblivia was a fascinating and enigmatic character, but there very little I liked about her in order to be emotionally invested in her story. Overall, I hope this book helps paves the way for more Australian dystopian stories that are also welded with pathos and in a highly literary style (if that made any sense).
Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kond of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden teinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out of the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notuces stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarm of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomitimg bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.
Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.
This book fills me with guilt because despite the fragments of evocative and beautifully written prose (as shown with the aforementiomed excerpts), I... just could not get into it. It's a book I believe that needs several readings and time/patience to unpack all the meaning in its heavily metaphorical and intertextual writing in order to fully enjoy it. I wish I could say I liked the book, but I think I just appreciated/respected what the book is clearly trying to talk about (e.g. Australia and its history of being *the worst* with the Aborigines, climate change, sense of displacement and belonging, etc) than I did enjoy it. Oblivia was a fascinating and enigmatic character, but there very little I liked about her in order to be emotionally invested in her story. Overall, I hope this book helps paves the way for more Australian dystopian stories that are also welded with pathos and in a highly literary style (if that made any sense).
November 2, 2013
I was completely immersed in the language - the poetry, the jolts of vernacular, the flow from one into the other. While the plot follows young Indigenous woman Oblivia Ethyl(ene) when she is removed from her Country, this is really a novel about displacement and belonging for all of us. In a world gone haywire thanks to climate change, nobody belongs anywhere anymore. Everything is foreign - the plagues of wildlife, the once reliable weather, the increasing flood of climate refugees. The setting is harsh but often stunning, crossing Australia from the interior to the decaying cities.
December 10, 2014
I found this novel extremely laborious.
While Wright writes beautiful sentences, the actual prose was so fragmented to the extent that I needed to keep re-reading passages to fully understand what was going on. The sense of place was also incredibly vague.
That's not to say that her writing is without merit or profundity, but the only way I will ever understand this novel is if someone unpacks it for me.
I'm curious to see if her other novels are as abstract as this one.
While Wright writes beautiful sentences, the actual prose was so fragmented to the extent that I needed to keep re-reading passages to fully understand what was going on. The sense of place was also incredibly vague.
That's not to say that her writing is without merit or profundity, but the only way I will ever understand this novel is if someone unpacks it for me.
I'm curious to see if her other novels are as abstract as this one.
May 7, 2021
This is strange and disturbing and magical.
Jacqui Katona's narration is perfect for the story.
"It was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed."
Jacqui Katona's narration is perfect for the story.
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