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Praiseworthy
The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian author Alexis Wright.
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
Praise for Alexis
‘The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice.’ — Tara June Winch
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
Praise for Alexis
‘The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice.’ — Tara June Winch
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
758 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2023
About the author
Alexis Wright
31 books357 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 108 reviews
August 1, 2024
Winner of the 2024 Stella Prize
Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Memorial Prize - Fiction
Winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Award
Is this the book of the century?
“Praiseworthy” is an understatement... this is a work of sheer bloody genius.
An ochre haze settles over the remote Aboriginal community of Praiseworthy. A climate-change visionary seeks a god donkey; a despairing teen walks into the ocean to drown; a boy waits for rescue by the blonde minister-lady in her white Canberra palace; a woman communes with ancestral moths and ponders the meaning of country.
Praiseworthy works its magic in a deep-time tradition of orality — repeating and rehashing and circling back in an iterative fashion. The story does not move linearly forward, but round and about like a mad teacup ride; there’s a pattern, a geometry, underlying everything, only you’re too dizzy in the moment to see it.
The novel deals with some dark issues: the omnicidal Anthropocene, Aboriginal youth suicide, the Intervention, the dispossession of a continent. But Alexis Wright balances bleakness with beauty, savage wit, the satirical and the absurd. Her unique prose style is breathtakingly pleonastic — this maximalism is a feature, not a bug.
Hazy Praiseworthy delivers a riparian flood of poetry in long run-on passages of strange syntax and odd constructions. Into this torrent are sprinkled ‘spicks and specks’ of:
-Indigenous words (‘just a cheap tourist souvenir statue of a Marraji’),
-Aussie slang (‘in the creek pashing frogs’)
-Latin legal maxims (‘cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos’)
-Italian musical terms (‘her con spirito view of her con sordino life’)
-Uh, Old Norse? (‘En their medh riki fara…’)
-And fun tiny bubbles of wordplay (‘religious allsorts’; ‘sleep-depraved’)
It’s the kind of book you can flip open to any random page and find a passage to linger over. You’re equally likely to find something astonishingly beautiful, deeply wise, or wickedly funny. But the effect of the whole is even greater. Wright distils her ideas only to atomise them back into the haze. Homeric repetition of epithets and phrases cast an incantation of epic proportions to match the incomprehensible time scale of Aboriginal culture. Sixty thousand years of continuous occupation of the continent suffuses the text via the oft-repeated ‘sixty thousand lightning strikes’. The ever-present toxic haze of grief finds its inverse in clouds of ancestral butterflies. There are donkeys. So many donkeys.
You can’t drive through Praiseworthy in a day. You have to stay a while, to stop worrying about all the elsewhere you need to be, slow it down and just sit. Listen to the oracles — they repeat themselves and each other endlessly, but that only gives you more time to think.
A dusty Milky Way river of stars out of five.
Winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Memorial Prize - Fiction
Winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Award
Is this the book of the century?
“Praiseworthy” is an understatement... this is a work of sheer bloody genius.
An ochre haze settles over the remote Aboriginal community of Praiseworthy. A climate-change visionary seeks a god donkey; a despairing teen walks into the ocean to drown; a boy waits for rescue by the blonde minister-lady in her white Canberra palace; a woman communes with ancestral moths and ponders the meaning of country.
Praiseworthy works its magic in a deep-time tradition of orality — repeating and rehashing and circling back in an iterative fashion. The story does not move linearly forward, but round and about like a mad teacup ride; there’s a pattern, a geometry, underlying everything, only you’re too dizzy in the moment to see it.
The novel deals with some dark issues: the omnicidal Anthropocene, Aboriginal youth suicide, the Intervention, the dispossession of a continent. But Alexis Wright balances bleakness with beauty, savage wit, the satirical and the absurd. Her unique prose style is breathtakingly pleonastic — this maximalism is a feature, not a bug.
‘With old-world thinking you have to reach down into the depths of time to raise it to the surface, and compete with the faster-than-thought new world twaddle dazzle skimming across the skin of the spirit.’
Hazy Praiseworthy delivers a riparian flood of poetry in long run-on passages of strange syntax and odd constructions. Into this torrent are sprinkled ‘spicks and specks’ of:
-Indigenous words (‘just a cheap tourist souvenir statue of a Marraji’),
-Aussie slang (‘in the creek pashing frogs’)
-Latin legal maxims (‘cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos’)
-Italian musical terms (‘her con spirito view of her con sordino life’)
-Uh, Old Norse? (‘En their medh riki fara…’)
-And fun tiny bubbles of wordplay (‘religious allsorts’; ‘sleep-depraved’)
It’s the kind of book you can flip open to any random page and find a passage to linger over. You’re equally likely to find something astonishingly beautiful, deeply wise, or wickedly funny. But the effect of the whole is even greater. Wright distils her ideas only to atomise them back into the haze. Homeric repetition of epithets and phrases cast an incantation of epic proportions to match the incomprehensible time scale of Aboriginal culture. Sixty thousand years of continuous occupation of the continent suffuses the text via the oft-repeated ‘sixty thousand lightning strikes’. The ever-present toxic haze of grief finds its inverse in clouds of ancestral butterflies. There are donkeys. So many donkeys.
You can’t drive through Praiseworthy in a day. You have to stay a while, to stop worrying about all the elsewhere you need to be, slow it down and just sit. Listen to the oracles — they repeat themselves and each other endlessly, but that only gives you more time to think.
A dusty Milky Way river of stars out of five.
July 28, 2024
Jeeeeeezus. What am I going to say here? What can I even say? There is nothing I can say to do this novel any justice. And there is nothing I can say to convey just how much this juggernaut impressed me.
Ambitious. Frustrating. Dense. Compelling. Lyrical. Satirical. Monstrous. Magical. Maximalist. A postmodern epic on steroids.
It’s a wild allegorical tale that explores an array of subjects: climate change, Indigenous rights or rather lack of rights, sovereignty, Australian politics, white nationalism, fascism, and the list goes on.
Should I lie to you and say that I understood everything this novel was saying or going for? Nah, I’m not going to do that. A lot went over my head, mostly because I am not well versed in Australian politics, and at times I couldn’t catch my bearings in the story. But don’t let any of this scare you off: the novel is very lived in. Alexis takes you on the most kaleidoscopic odyssey. She’s guiding you. You may not comprehend everything she is showing you, but she is still guiding you nonetheless. You’re in capable hands. You just have to trust her.
It’s hard to describe Alexis’ writing style. You gotta read it to understand. It’s like an amalgamation of stream of consciousness, magical realism, tangents, prose poetry, and oral storytelling. It feels like Alexis has made a conscious effort to reject the style of white Australian writing, by creating a style that can claim no ownership other than her own. A rejection of anything that resembles the style of her colonizers. Interestingly enough, with her style the narrative gets away from itself, and then we’re reminded that we need to get back on course, kind of like someone telling you a story, going and back and forth with details and tangents. Or perhaps stories that are being passed on to others. It makes for a spectacularly dizzying experience.
It took me about 100 pages before I could really get into the rhythm of things, when things started to fall into place, where I finally had my feet planted firmly onto the ground. Well kinda. Being confused is part of the fun. The second half of the book is the half that bears its nakedness. It hit me in the feels, ripped my heart out to be honest. It goes into unbelievably sad territory, but also morphs into something truly majestic and otherworldly, almost spiritual.
People are saying this has to be on the Booker longlist. I agree with said people. It’s a masterpiece unlike anything I’ve read. How could it not make the list? But I could also see it not making it because maybe it’ll be considered too heady and challenging (and too long) for some. The Booker can be finicky. Fingers crossed though.
This is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one. A glorious undertaking. A book that caused my brain to break in the best way possible. Jeeeeezus.
Ambitious. Frustrating. Dense. Compelling. Lyrical. Satirical. Monstrous. Magical. Maximalist. A postmodern epic on steroids.
It’s a wild allegorical tale that explores an array of subjects: climate change, Indigenous rights or rather lack of rights, sovereignty, Australian politics, white nationalism, fascism, and the list goes on.
Should I lie to you and say that I understood everything this novel was saying or going for? Nah, I’m not going to do that. A lot went over my head, mostly because I am not well versed in Australian politics, and at times I couldn’t catch my bearings in the story. But don’t let any of this scare you off: the novel is very lived in. Alexis takes you on the most kaleidoscopic odyssey. She’s guiding you. You may not comprehend everything she is showing you, but she is still guiding you nonetheless. You’re in capable hands. You just have to trust her.
It’s hard to describe Alexis’ writing style. You gotta read it to understand. It’s like an amalgamation of stream of consciousness, magical realism, tangents, prose poetry, and oral storytelling. It feels like Alexis has made a conscious effort to reject the style of white Australian writing, by creating a style that can claim no ownership other than her own. A rejection of anything that resembles the style of her colonizers. Interestingly enough, with her style the narrative gets away from itself, and then we’re reminded that we need to get back on course, kind of like someone telling you a story, going and back and forth with details and tangents. Or perhaps stories that are being passed on to others. It makes for a spectacularly dizzying experience.
It took me about 100 pages before I could really get into the rhythm of things, when things started to fall into place, where I finally had my feet planted firmly onto the ground. Well kinda. Being confused is part of the fun. The second half of the book is the half that bears its nakedness. It hit me in the feels, ripped my heart out to be honest. It goes into unbelievably sad territory, but also morphs into something truly majestic and otherworldly, almost spiritual.
People are saying this has to be on the Booker longlist. I agree with said people. It’s a masterpiece unlike anything I’ve read. How could it not make the list? But I could also see it not making it because maybe it’ll be considered too heady and challenging (and too long) for some. The Booker can be finicky. Fingers crossed though.
This is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one. A glorious undertaking. A book that caused my brain to break in the best way possible. Jeeeeezus.
Read
August 17, 2024Chinua Achebe wrote in his essay “The Art of Fiction”:
I have a feeling Alexis Wright would agree with him. It seems, her motivation for writing “Praiseworthy” has overlapped at least partially with this mission. The universe of her novel cannot be reduced to any representation, but she certainly tries to establish a history or a tradition of storytelling owned by her community as opposed to the narratives imposed on it by the “
In my view, the best way to start with this novel is not its first page but the brilliant essay Alexis Write published in Meanjin in 2016. It provides with some context but also with a key how to approach the book. In the essay, she says the following among many other important issues:
As she mentioned, the aboriginal “story-making” has deteriorated due to complexity of those stories and the nature of “grievances”. “It is almost impossible to get the story straight.”. So the potential story-teller requires a lot of energy in a way how these stories narrated and presented. In essence this huge novel is her attempt to address this diagnosis. But also it is there to demonstrate the problem in meta-fictional way. On my first reading, it came across as a narrative “confused and cluttered” , occasionally repetitive consisting of a “of historical and contemporary fragments” and deeply rooted in “the oral storytelling culture.”. The sentences, some of them are very lengthy seem to be more naturally understood on listening or while reading aloud. In a way they are more reflective of a musicality and intonation of a speech rather than a written text.
After reading the essay, i understood that this way of exposition was very likely her deliberate choice for writing this book. But I have to admit that repetitiveness of some of the sub-plots, especially for the first 500 pages of the book, and somewhat declarative characterisation with the main message of each character being again repeated many times has exhausted me. Someone said that the good literature should exhaust. It is certainly a good literature on these grounds.
At the core of the book is an aboriginal community called Praiseworthy depicted at the stage of unravelling into sheer madness and incoherence. The causes of this are pretty obvious: mainly the system of control and subjugation created by the central government in Canberra and climate change. However, this only creates a backdrop of the story. Wright seems to want to reveal how these factors affect community members by often making them hostile to each other and causing the most vulnerable of them make tragic mistakes. In this respect, this book is as if Demons by Dostoyevsky being transferred into the aboriginal reality with main antihero becoming a child rather than a young man and feral donkeys replace the biblical pigs. However instead of Dostoyevsky’s preference for psychological depth and fast-paced plot, this novel tends towards an allegory.
Another novel that was coming to my mind while reading this one was The Melancholy of Resistance with its lengthy sentences, satire nature and slow pace. This one is less philosophical and more poetic and also more political. However, it is worth repeating that 'Praiseworthy" is a very unique novel in terms of the form and the experiences it conveys. Its mechanism cannot be simply compared to any western literary tools or novelistic tradition. Its roots in aboriginal story-telling seems to be inherent in its purpose. In respect of the form, Wright does something very interesting with time. The novel does not have any necessary chronological timeline. It seems the reader can broadly create her own one which gives the novel its timelessness. In fact it seems the reader can come up with a several possible ending point for the narrative. This is brilliantly intriguing. Another feature is hyperreality in a sense that the novel consists of a limited number of the scenes built on accretion and overlaps where the time slows down beyond any physical consideration practically to stand-still and traps the reader in at that moment together with characters.
It terms of the content, it is a fiercely political novel, almost declaratively so. It is an angry and bitter satire that obviously criticises the system. But it seems to me, less obviously it shows the community unable to find imagination to resist and the price its children paying for it.
This is an example:
The most substantial part of the novel is written in this style. I’ve seen this novel is referred to as a “polyphonic”. However it seems more like a work written in a single voice from the bird eye view of a powerful omnipresent narrator. This narrator has got an important, urgent and tragic message to convey through the characters. But often it is done at the expense of the character’s depth. I guess it is an effective tool if the main purpose of the narrative is in the message. The sentence structure in this passage is typical for the book as well: elliptic and lengthy, rich in adjectives and metaphors. But occasionally i was reminded of the adjective “cluttered” from her essay.
The characters seem to be deliberately allegorical: symbolic almost to the point of being one-dimensional, serving predominately their main separate obsessions and sacrificing their community and the loved ones in the process. I guess the main point is that they were shaped by the system and lost some essential part of their humanity due to it. However, i occasionally longed for a bit of more nuance. How is it possible that the head of the family seem to neglect the needs of this family chasing donkeys to fulfil some utopian dream? Why is that he calls his newly born son “fascist”? And later he repeats: “mischievous young son, the born fascist who was useless to him”. It is more understandable how this boy aged eight has become the source of evil in the community. However, i still found difficult to stomach that everyone including his father refers to him as a “fat fascist”. I felt very torn on the account of this way of storytelling. I understood that it is an allegory that by definition is grossly exaggerated for effect. On the other hand, I knew that it is referred to very real tragic problems present in the Aboriginal community often due to harmful and misguided policies of the government. So a bit of realism in the story telling would help me to see this link within the novel: how come that the child be referred as a "fat fascist". To my shame, i was longing for “show not tell” element.
The most puzzling i found a utopian subplot or a business plan of a sort by the main character called Cause Man Steel also Widespread also Planet. The sheer amount of his names was by itself difficult to follow. Again the allusion is deliberate and easy to understand. And it is effective in a way that I always needed to pause and check is it the Planet or is it this guy we are talking about. His big idea was to adapt to post-global warming by creating a “transport conglomerate” from feral donkeys who would survive the heat. The enterprise was designed to be profit making as the guy wanted to get rich. In order to achieve that he travelled extensively fetching donkeys elsewhere, sometimes steeling them and bringing them back to the village for his poor wife to be faced with consequences. The details of this enterprise as seen through his eyes were repeated in the text many times. Very likely it was done to stress its paranoid nature. But the side effect for my reading experience was a feeling of dread as soon as the narrative would come back to his endeavours so futile they seemed. I did not feel the need to repeat them so many times. He also seemed to neglect and alienate his sons apart from giving them lectures they seemed not to appreciate. And this character was consistently called “The Dreamer” by the narrator. I was puzzled until the end of the novel what kind of an allegorical symbolism he was representing.
However there was one character that was easy to understand and sympathise with. His name was “Aboriginal Sovereignty”. He was a seventeen years old boy. He had to tragically disappear. The story of his hopes cut short by idiotic accusations and his powerlessness to fight those was movingly and humanly told. It is a shame that his character did not have an agency for the majority of the novel. Of course why it was the case might be the most important message of the book and its most powerful allegory together with his name.
The omnipresent narrator has the following to say about the importance for the community of this one single boy and his fate:
The novel is understandably quite bleak. It reveals the depth of despair of those people and their rage. This is the mother of Aboriginal Sovereignty:
Also the novel reveals the lack of unity between the community members. The tragic events sadly seem to polarise them even more on the views of their future and further isolate the affected family.
Far and between this relentless powerful stream of grievances and rage combined with appeal for being heard and understood, there are a few scenes of epic proportion in the novel. The most memorable for me were the fight between the donkeys and the people on the ancestor beach and a fable of a ship rescuing destitute people all over the world. In addition, the nature is represented very vividly. Occasionally i would come across on a passage of exquisite beauty to escape into:
Allegory to be sustainable needs to be short. Realistic novel can be very long but it relies on the depth of characterisation and the plot. This one is something different from both of these options. However, it does deliver its message effectively if sometimes a bit repetitively. Now the question is where the message would be heard both outside and inside the aboriginal community. It seems, as a polemic this novel is addressed for the first and foremost to the aboriginal community rather than to the outsiders. This is probably a strength and definitely not a limitation.
However, powerful messages in this book are both universal and grounded in our common shared actuality. The stark broader message is conveyed with the help of eight year old “fascist”:
Everyone is implicated in some way by this definition. The options to do something about this for an individual seem limited. But I want to believe there is still a choice. It has reminded me of a thought I’ve recently read in Anam, another novel by an Australian author Andre Dao:
It is the one of those books that potentially should be studied at schools, especially in Australia, but not only. Only in the last few weeks, there were two stories in the news that reminded me about this novel. The one was about the revision of the rights of indigenous population in New Zealand. And another about forcibly taking the children from Roma family in the UK that caused a riot. However, i’ve heard on-line someone called this book “a novel about donkeys” before reading it. It requires a lot of patience and dedication from its readers and there is a risk that it might be reduced to dystopian visions of some of his characters.
This is the novel I would not attempt to assign stars to after just one reading.
PS
Here is the clip of Tasma Walton performs an extract from the novel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbHGx...
It just confirms how much it benefits from an oral rendition.
There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realised that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail- the bravery, even, of the lions.
I have a feeling Alexis Wright would agree with him. It seems, her motivation for writing “Praiseworthy” has overlapped at least partially with this mission. The universe of her novel cannot be reduced to any representation, but she certainly tries to establish a history or a tradition of storytelling owned by her community as opposed to the narratives imposed on it by the “
In my view, the best way to start with this novel is not its first page but the brilliant essay Alexis Write published in Meanjin in 2016. It provides with some context but also with a key how to approach the book. In the essay, she says the following among many other important issues:
If you were to examine the power play of government domination in Aboriginal affairs that has occurred over a long period of time, then you would also see the accompanying and perhaps equal extent of deterioration in the practice of Aboriginal story-making or storytelling. Our stories have become confused and cluttered with what is truth and what is believed, of what can be told or what can be heard, and by whom. These stories, a whirl of historical and contemporary fragments of what has happened and what has never been resolved, are at risk of losing their strength in the telling. Our voice can be overwhelmed with the complex of historical intensities in the unique stories of each and every one of us. Our storytelling requires enormous energy, and increasingly requires even greater storytelling skills. It is difficult to get the story straight as a group, as a people, to form a vision. The story becomes one of compromises, and so complex in the nature of grievances that storytelling becomes impossible for the Aboriginal person who should be telling his or her own stories in depth and vision, and it is almost impossible to get the story straight, impossible to reach consensus about stories, and paradoxically, actually contributing to all of those outside processes that are at work to compromise the voice of our oral storytelling culture.
As she mentioned, the aboriginal “story-making” has deteriorated due to complexity of those stories and the nature of “grievances”. “It is almost impossible to get the story straight.”. So the potential story-teller requires a lot of energy in a way how these stories narrated and presented. In essence this huge novel is her attempt to address this diagnosis. But also it is there to demonstrate the problem in meta-fictional way. On my first reading, it came across as a narrative “confused and cluttered” , occasionally repetitive consisting of a “of historical and contemporary fragments” and deeply rooted in “the oral storytelling culture.”. The sentences, some of them are very lengthy seem to be more naturally understood on listening or while reading aloud. In a way they are more reflective of a musicality and intonation of a speech rather than a written text.
After reading the essay, i understood that this way of exposition was very likely her deliberate choice for writing this book. But I have to admit that repetitiveness of some of the sub-plots, especially for the first 500 pages of the book, and somewhat declarative characterisation with the main message of each character being again repeated many times has exhausted me. Someone said that the good literature should exhaust. It is certainly a good literature on these grounds.
At the core of the book is an aboriginal community called Praiseworthy depicted at the stage of unravelling into sheer madness and incoherence. The causes of this are pretty obvious: mainly the system of control and subjugation created by the central government in Canberra and climate change. However, this only creates a backdrop of the story. Wright seems to want to reveal how these factors affect community members by often making them hostile to each other and causing the most vulnerable of them make tragic mistakes. In this respect, this book is as if Demons by Dostoyevsky being transferred into the aboriginal reality with main antihero becoming a child rather than a young man and feral donkeys replace the biblical pigs. However instead of Dostoyevsky’s preference for psychological depth and fast-paced plot, this novel tends towards an allegory.
Another novel that was coming to my mind while reading this one was The Melancholy of Resistance with its lengthy sentences, satire nature and slow pace. This one is less philosophical and more poetic and also more political. However, it is worth repeating that 'Praiseworthy" is a very unique novel in terms of the form and the experiences it conveys. Its mechanism cannot be simply compared to any western literary tools or novelistic tradition. Its roots in aboriginal story-telling seems to be inherent in its purpose. In respect of the form, Wright does something very interesting with time. The novel does not have any necessary chronological timeline. It seems the reader can broadly create her own one which gives the novel its timelessness. In fact it seems the reader can come up with a several possible ending point for the narrative. This is brilliantly intriguing. Another feature is hyperreality in a sense that the novel consists of a limited number of the scenes built on accretion and overlaps where the time slows down beyond any physical consideration practically to stand-still and traps the reader in at that moment together with characters.
It terms of the content, it is a fiercely political novel, almost declaratively so. It is an angry and bitter satire that obviously criticises the system. But it seems to me, less obviously it shows the community unable to find imagination to resist and the price its children paying for it.
This is an example:
little boy was sleuthing himself away from his befuddlement from coming to terms with being dropped off by his father in this wreckage of an environment. You could call this the result of blind political will enacted over several generations against the original inhabitants, accompanying the bewildering act of feral and gross neglect about the way that these first children of the land were being treated even by their own fathers, but in his seriously impacted child’s mind, an enormous furnace hissed and spat fumes like a volcano amidst a high magnitude earthquake where savage camp dogs chasing one another – more than any person could conjure in a string of random thoughts over any lifetime – bowled each other over in dog fights. And above all of this, floated the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, the middle-aged blonde lady sitting on her office chair swivelling in the sky loaded with dust particles struck by the sun, who the child kept imagining was a golden angel, who in her gleaming yellow wattle suit and golden jewellery, could easily have unleashed through her outstretched hands missiles firing multi-tongues of fire that shot ‘far out’ across the land while singeing feral cats as they wandered the country in plague proportions. The boy went searching through his mind to find his parents who he seriously wanted to kill..”(p 649).
The most substantial part of the novel is written in this style. I’ve seen this novel is referred to as a “polyphonic”. However it seems more like a work written in a single voice from the bird eye view of a powerful omnipresent narrator. This narrator has got an important, urgent and tragic message to convey through the characters. But often it is done at the expense of the character’s depth. I guess it is an effective tool if the main purpose of the narrative is in the message. The sentence structure in this passage is typical for the book as well: elliptic and lengthy, rich in adjectives and metaphors. But occasionally i was reminded of the adjective “cluttered” from her essay.
The characters seem to be deliberately allegorical: symbolic almost to the point of being one-dimensional, serving predominately their main separate obsessions and sacrificing their community and the loved ones in the process. I guess the main point is that they were shaped by the system and lost some essential part of their humanity due to it. However, i occasionally longed for a bit of more nuance. How is it possible that the head of the family seem to neglect the needs of this family chasing donkeys to fulfil some utopian dream? Why is that he calls his newly born son “fascist”? And later he repeats: “mischievous young son, the born fascist who was useless to him”. It is more understandable how this boy aged eight has become the source of evil in the community. However, i still found difficult to stomach that everyone including his father refers to him as a “fat fascist”. I felt very torn on the account of this way of storytelling. I understood that it is an allegory that by definition is grossly exaggerated for effect. On the other hand, I knew that it is referred to very real tragic problems present in the Aboriginal community often due to harmful and misguided policies of the government. So a bit of realism in the story telling would help me to see this link within the novel: how come that the child be referred as a "fat fascist". To my shame, i was longing for “show not tell” element.
The most puzzling i found a utopian subplot or a business plan of a sort by the main character called Cause Man Steel also Widespread also Planet. The sheer amount of his names was by itself difficult to follow. Again the allusion is deliberate and easy to understand. And it is effective in a way that I always needed to pause and check is it the Planet or is it this guy we are talking about. His big idea was to adapt to post-global warming by creating a “transport conglomerate” from feral donkeys who would survive the heat. The enterprise was designed to be profit making as the guy wanted to get rich. In order to achieve that he travelled extensively fetching donkeys elsewhere, sometimes steeling them and bringing them back to the village for his poor wife to be faced with consequences. The details of this enterprise as seen through his eyes were repeated in the text many times. Very likely it was done to stress its paranoid nature. But the side effect for my reading experience was a feeling of dread as soon as the narrative would come back to his endeavours so futile they seemed. I did not feel the need to repeat them so many times. He also seemed to neglect and alienate his sons apart from giving them lectures they seemed not to appreciate. And this character was consistently called “The Dreamer” by the narrator. I was puzzled until the end of the novel what kind of an allegorical symbolism he was representing.
However there was one character that was easy to understand and sympathise with. His name was “Aboriginal Sovereignty”. He was a seventeen years old boy. He had to tragically disappear. The story of his hopes cut short by idiotic accusations and his powerlessness to fight those was movingly and humanly told. It is a shame that his character did not have an agency for the majority of the novel. Of course why it was the case might be the most important message of the book and its most powerful allegory together with his name.
The omnipresent narrator has the following to say about the importance for the community of this one single boy and his fate:
Anyone on Earth could feverishly dream about good things happening in their particular part of the world, and yearn for better days to come in their mind, but in the world of Praiseworthy imagination, they collectively longed to know what type of man Aboriginal Sovereignty would become, for he was already intimately known in a dreamlike state of mind as being of themselves, the you and me, the representation of truth in the ancestral creation of the collective family – before he had suddenly become the very opposite of the dreamt. And instead, what had now turned up, what came out of the haze of the era, was this vile old paedophile who had materialised the collective view of themselves. They too saw themselves transformed into the worst nightmare that was so frenzied and frightening that you would be too afraid to look and see what you had been told to see, what the white world of media and government saw – that a paedophile looked like Aboriginal people – and so you did not want to look from believing, that if you rose from the hole of eternal doubting you had dug yourself into, you would be destined only to see paedophilia in yourself, and in this old people’s ancestral sovereign world, it felt like some unnatural force had destroyed the eternal flame of hopefulness always seen in a sixty thousand lightning flash thunderstorm’s song.
The novel is understandably quite bleak. It reveals the depth of despair of those people and their rage. This is the mother of Aboriginal Sovereignty:
I am the murderer in waiting, ready to kill police, government, gossipers, as well as those fuckin bitches with fat-lips Ice (members of the community propagating assimilationist views). That is what I feel like these days - just killing everybody.
Also the novel reveals the lack of unity between the community members. The tragic events sadly seem to polarise them even more on the views of their future and further isolate the affected family.
Far and between this relentless powerful stream of grievances and rage combined with appeal for being heard and understood, there are a few scenes of epic proportion in the novel. The most memorable for me were the fight between the donkeys and the people on the ancestor beach and a fable of a ship rescuing destitute people all over the world. In addition, the nature is represented very vividly. Occasionally i would come across on a passage of exquisite beauty to escape into:
“There, once back on the ground while resting their wings, whispering about being Noctuidae, of the smorgasbord of colour and patterns on each other’s wings, and reading the story board of evolution in the orange, yellow, mauve in the old lady moths’ night-raiding, nibbling on overripe fruit, for the granny’s cloak moths could be seen flying in circles against the counter-clockwise flight of the four o’clock moths, and so many others that looked like flying leaf-litter landing in the dusty, ancient tangling of drooping vines, where vibrating wings were whispering through the moonlight hours.”
Allegory to be sustainable needs to be short. Realistic novel can be very long but it relies on the depth of characterisation and the plot. This one is something different from both of these options. However, it does deliver its message effectively if sometimes a bit repetitively. Now the question is where the message would be heard both outside and inside the aboriginal community. It seems, as a polemic this novel is addressed for the first and foremost to the aboriginal community rather than to the outsiders. This is probably a strength and definitely not a limitation.
Broken children. Broken thoughts. Links to all times broken? Broken deranged and emotive sick brains?
However, powerful messages in this book are both universal and grounded in our common shared actuality. The stark broader message is conveyed with the help of eight year old “fascist”:
Still though, Tommyhawk lied by telling the imagined saltwater crocodiles hunting for murderers while swimming in the mangrove roots of the incoming tide, that he had never actually seen anyone take their own life before, even though he had witnessed quite a number of youth suicides, and you could say he had been implicated, although he only watched, which could have been anyone else watching something bad happening in the world but doing nothing about it.
Everyone is implicated in some way by this definition. The options to do something about this for an individual seem limited. But I want to believe there is still a choice. It has reminded me of a thought I’ve recently read in Anam, another novel by an Australian author Andre Dao:
There is no such thing as having no choice- I don’t believe in that. Not for me, and not for you. For others, perhaps, in the abstract- the poor have no choice, the radicalised have no choice, the chemically imbalanced have no choice. When I am feeling particularly objective-after bracing reading group on Capital, say - I might even believe that the rich and powerful have no choice, that they are buffeted by the winds of social forces as much as anyone else. But for you and me I claim the privilege of choosing and being judged for our choosing. Is there any more privilege more bourgeois or more precious?
It is the one of those books that potentially should be studied at schools, especially in Australia, but not only. Only in the last few weeks, there were two stories in the news that reminded me about this novel. The one was about the revision of the rights of indigenous population in New Zealand. And another about forcibly taking the children from Roma family in the UK that caused a riot. However, i’ve heard on-line someone called this book “a novel about donkeys” before reading it. It requires a lot of patience and dedication from its readers and there is a risk that it might be reduced to dystopian visions of some of his characters.
This is the novel I would not attempt to assign stars to after just one reading.
PS
Here is the clip of Tasma Walton performs an extract from the novel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbHGx...
It just confirms how much it benefits from an oral rendition.
April 15, 2024
Wow, quite a read this one. Alexis Wright has produced an intensely polemical novel about indigenous rights in Australia and the way the white colonisers have maginalised the Aborigine population.
The text does become repetitive (how many times did I read "sixty thousand lightning bolts"?) however it does have a purpose making the prose read as almost incantatory. I did find this aspect a little tiring though so dropped the rating the one *
The text does become repetitive (how many times did I read "sixty thousand lightning bolts"?) however it does have a purpose making the prose read as almost incantatory. I did find this aspect a little tiring though so dropped the rating the one *
February 19, 2024
Praiseworthy is a fictional aboriginal town in Australia. We follow the story of four characters. Cause Man Steel is the father of a family of four who wants to launch a donkey transport industry and, by doing so, combat the climate change. His wife, Dance, spends her days studying butterflies and dreaming of relocating to China. Their son named Aboriginal Sovereignty is contemplating suicide, while their other son, Tommyhawk, is plotting to be adopted by Australia's most powerful woman and thus become white and powerful.
Alexis Wright's writing style is unique and dreamlike. The story is not told in a chronological way and does not have a main protagonist. Instead, we primarily follow Cause Man Steel's family and their experiences in Praiseworthy. We jump from character to character and there are themes of magical realism throughout this story. The theme of colonization of aboriginal people ties the narrative together and makes the reader think about the difficulties of assimilation.
I enjoyed this story primarily because it made me think about the unique ways of living in an aboriginal community. This story is urgent and timely and I think anyone would benefit from reading it. I would recommend this book to any fans of literary fiction and foreign literature. If you enjoy lyrical writing style, you should enjoy Praiseworthy. Overall, I liked this book and I will be checking out Alexis Wright's other books.
Alexis Wright's writing style is unique and dreamlike. The story is not told in a chronological way and does not have a main protagonist. Instead, we primarily follow Cause Man Steel's family and their experiences in Praiseworthy. We jump from character to character and there are themes of magical realism throughout this story. The theme of colonization of aboriginal people ties the narrative together and makes the reader think about the difficulties of assimilation.
I enjoyed this story primarily because it made me think about the unique ways of living in an aboriginal community. This story is urgent and timely and I think anyone would benefit from reading it. I would recommend this book to any fans of literary fiction and foreign literature. If you enjoy lyrical writing style, you should enjoy Praiseworthy. Overall, I liked this book and I will be checking out Alexis Wright's other books.
April 21, 2024
Look, I get it: it's important, it's lyrical, it does magical things with language but, beware, it's mind-numbingly boring.
July 17, 2024
What a book!
February 18, 2024
Convoluted rant. I desperately tried to like it, but it was so hard to enjoy due to the writing style.
May 1, 2023
Alexis Wright will surely one day be Australia's next Nobel laureate for Literature. I am only 250 pages into the 700 pages of 'Praiseworthy' and it is a modern epic of biblical proportions with a haze for the climate-change ages hanging over the town. Elders sit around in white plastic chairs as a battle rages between assimilationist major mayor Ice Pick and Widespread Planet, his adversary, who seeks an elusive platinum donkey in an attempt to build an Aboriginal transportation business that can rise above the challenges of the post climate-change world. And so as Ice Pick communes with a golden christmas beetle and Dance, the moth-er mother of Widespread Planet's children, shares the dreaming of moths and butterflies, their sons Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk are locked in their own deadly conflict. Aboriginal Sovereignty has a death wish, an outcome sorely desired by his eight year old brother Tommyhawk who fears his community is overrun by paedophiles. In the world of the eight year old boy, the A.B.C. looms large as a peddler of endless stories about paedophilia in Aboriginal communities. As a result, Tommyhawk fears his father and all the other men in his town (as well as his older brother) reporting them to the police and to the lady in charge of Anoriginal people in Canberra. In fact, Tommyhawk is desperate to be rescued by the police or the army so he can go and live with the woman in her big house in Canberra. And so life in modern Australia is depicted as a nightmare for Indigenous people trying to hold onto their beliefs and knowledge as the land becomes more and more degraded. And we are all implicated. Even the A.B.C.
Picking up a copy of Chester Eagle's 2010 collection of essays on Australian Literature, 'The Well in the Shadow' at the Salvos yesterday, I can see that Chester picked up on something special in her first novel, 'Carpentaria'. Eagle writes, "I think the arrival of this remarkable book is a sign that we are in a time of synthesis, that is, a time when two cultures, having understood each other to some extent, begin the process of merging, each borrowing the strengths of the other, and inevitably, discarding a few weaknesses along the way." (359) I think synthesis is absolutely desirable but the whole situation is a lot more desperate than this. Noel Pearson is right when he says the Voice referendum is a 'last chance' opportunity.' Praiseworthy' is an important book because it goes to the heart and soul of the people caught up in the whole sorry mess but they possessed by strengths that are only now able to be fully expressed through the literature created by an Alexis Wright.
Picking up a copy of Chester Eagle's 2010 collection of essays on Australian Literature, 'The Well in the Shadow' at the Salvos yesterday, I can see that Chester picked up on something special in her first novel, 'Carpentaria'. Eagle writes, "I think the arrival of this remarkable book is a sign that we are in a time of synthesis, that is, a time when two cultures, having understood each other to some extent, begin the process of merging, each borrowing the strengths of the other, and inevitably, discarding a few weaknesses along the way." (359) I think synthesis is absolutely desirable but the whole situation is a lot more desperate than this. Noel Pearson is right when he says the Voice referendum is a 'last chance' opportunity.' Praiseworthy' is an important book because it goes to the heart and soul of the people caught up in the whole sorry mess but they possessed by strengths that are only now able to be fully expressed through the literature created by an Alexis Wright.
Shelved as 'abandoned-speed-dating'
September 15, 2024This isn't really me abandoning this book, just being realistic that I am not going to read it this year, when my focus is all over the place and I have no time (also the small matter of having left the book in another country).
Read
April 27, 2023How do you talk about a novel so massive, so voluble, so amplified by eagerness to speak for itself? Part of me is tempted to say: let it. Let it relate, tell, inform, scold, witness, bear whoever attempts it. First Nations literature in colonial countries is too often spoken for, or over. Let it speak already! (My ideal festival scenario: host angles their microphone not toward the author but their book, propped upon the marquee chair, inviting it to relate its story; the festival audience nods sagely, relieved for once to find themselves in the presence of someone so insightful about their own work.)
The Miles Franklin award-winning author Alexis Wright’s new novel is set in the Aboriginal community it is named for, Praiseworthy, a “prize-winning tidy town” caught in an era of great untidiness: its “coffin-choked land” filled with asbestos homes and “cruelty chic”, the “tumbledown life of poverty” periodically interrupted by “endless spite Twittering” – “the big-ticket underbelly of shrilly-dilly blame-calling”. As in all Wright’s work, Praiseworthy depicts cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: a realist’s view of colonisation, in short.
One fateful day, an “airborne anti-miraculousness” descends: a mysterious haze, the sum total of everything out of joint in the community. The townspeople do everything to combat it: spruik it as a tourist attraction, wait for government to blow it up, play it Dvorak and Bach, consider amending the constitution, send a butterfly to Canberra (the government shoots it with a blowtorch), build a giant hologram scarecrow of the mayor to scare it away. None of it works.
Into this chaos steps Cause, patriarch of the Steel family. Visionary and creator, collapsologist and local influencer – “freaky doomsayer”, “anomaly man”, “atmospheric pressure blackfella” – Cause is possessed by a “blue-sky vision” and can foresee a global climate crisis and the total collapse of the first-world economy. He puts his faith in Australia’s 5 million feral donkeys, hoping to create an Aboriginal-owned carbon neutral transport industry and ride out the end times upon their resilient, load-bearing backs. “Imagine! A donkey could replace Qantas itself and be far more sustainable.”
Cause’s cause echoes that of many colonised peoples, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous: how to use the techniques and tools of the coloniser while honouring your own cultural sovereignty and independence.
Read on: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
The Miles Franklin award-winning author Alexis Wright’s new novel is set in the Aboriginal community it is named for, Praiseworthy, a “prize-winning tidy town” caught in an era of great untidiness: its “coffin-choked land” filled with asbestos homes and “cruelty chic”, the “tumbledown life of poverty” periodically interrupted by “endless spite Twittering” – “the big-ticket underbelly of shrilly-dilly blame-calling”. As in all Wright’s work, Praiseworthy depicts cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: a realist’s view of colonisation, in short.
One fateful day, an “airborne anti-miraculousness” descends: a mysterious haze, the sum total of everything out of joint in the community. The townspeople do everything to combat it: spruik it as a tourist attraction, wait for government to blow it up, play it Dvorak and Bach, consider amending the constitution, send a butterfly to Canberra (the government shoots it with a blowtorch), build a giant hologram scarecrow of the mayor to scare it away. None of it works.
Into this chaos steps Cause, patriarch of the Steel family. Visionary and creator, collapsologist and local influencer – “freaky doomsayer”, “anomaly man”, “atmospheric pressure blackfella” – Cause is possessed by a “blue-sky vision” and can foresee a global climate crisis and the total collapse of the first-world economy. He puts his faith in Australia’s 5 million feral donkeys, hoping to create an Aboriginal-owned carbon neutral transport industry and ride out the end times upon their resilient, load-bearing backs. “Imagine! A donkey could replace Qantas itself and be far more sustainable.”
Cause’s cause echoes that of many colonised peoples, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous: how to use the techniques and tools of the coloniser while honouring your own cultural sovereignty and independence.
Read on: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
July 26, 2024
"Would the death of Aboriginal Sovereignty eventually mean something, or nothing at all?"
An epic read about a small Aboriginal town in Australia, covered by a pollution haze. A cast of families and people trying to make it big, whilst surviving the many White laws of the country in direct opposition to the Black lores and basic humanity.
A tale of a cast of characters, telling an allegory, both subtle and smack in the face, about the state of politicing for Aboriginal people on their own lands. The disadvantage orchestrated by the ruling colonisers, and the trap it sets, continually.
"These official close-the-gap searchers went door to door, with a trick questionnaire in their hands and a biro, to gather evidence leading to the discovery of what happened to their Aboriginal Sovereignty."
Oh, I had to stop marking sentences to come back to in awe, because there are just so many, in this 700 page book! So many stop-in-your-tracks commentary, comments, or clever play on words, that are just pure art.
There are threads examining the refugee policies, and plights, and the lateral violence of people seeking audience by playing the White man's game of fame and favour.
This is an epic, clever read, that wows, stops you cold, challenges and makes you laugh. A view of the state of it all, here in Australia.
A masterpiece.
An epic read about a small Aboriginal town in Australia, covered by a pollution haze. A cast of families and people trying to make it big, whilst surviving the many White laws of the country in direct opposition to the Black lores and basic humanity.
A tale of a cast of characters, telling an allegory, both subtle and smack in the face, about the state of politicing for Aboriginal people on their own lands. The disadvantage orchestrated by the ruling colonisers, and the trap it sets, continually.
"These official close-the-gap searchers went door to door, with a trick questionnaire in their hands and a biro, to gather evidence leading to the discovery of what happened to their Aboriginal Sovereignty."
Oh, I had to stop marking sentences to come back to in awe, because there are just so many, in this 700 page book! So many stop-in-your-tracks commentary, comments, or clever play on words, that are just pure art.
There are threads examining the refugee policies, and plights, and the lateral violence of people seeking audience by playing the White man's game of fame and favour.
This is an epic, clever read, that wows, stops you cold, challenges and makes you laugh. A view of the state of it all, here in Australia.
A masterpiece.
January 14, 2024
In Alexis Wright’s novels, plot is only half the story. Praiseworthy, the longest work to date by the Stella and Miles Franklin prize-winning Waanyi writer, is an abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future. This is a long journey through the imagination, a novel both urgent and deeply contemplated.
Praiseworthy combines aspects from Wright’s other works: it has the many voices of Tracker, which gave written form to oral storytelling and history; it redeploys that unsettling but evocative blend of ironic humour and apocalyptic imagery found in The Swan Book; and it has the interweaving of ancestral myth and contemporary heroism from Carpentaria.
But in order to tell this story, which explores the multiple realities of Australia, Wright uses a distinct and sometimes challenging perspective, in which scenes and the familiar comforts of dramatic structure are subordinated to a kind of self-aware epic vision, as though the unfolding mysteries of Praiseworthy are being observed from outer space by an all-seeing, empathic god-figure.
READ MORE HERE: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
Praiseworthy combines aspects from Wright’s other works: it has the many voices of Tracker, which gave written form to oral storytelling and history; it redeploys that unsettling but evocative blend of ironic humour and apocalyptic imagery found in The Swan Book; and it has the interweaving of ancestral myth and contemporary heroism from Carpentaria.
But in order to tell this story, which explores the multiple realities of Australia, Wright uses a distinct and sometimes challenging perspective, in which scenes and the familiar comforts of dramatic structure are subordinated to a kind of self-aware epic vision, as though the unfolding mysteries of Praiseworthy are being observed from outer space by an all-seeing, empathic god-figure.
READ MORE HERE: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
April 12, 2024
'Whoosh! More wind blew, or, it was like that, felt from the flutter of a moth. How sweet it would be, if one could read a story written on the wings of that moth stirring the breeze while flying in the moonlight. Dance said nothing about the lost home while reading the unfathomable or innumerable messages held in the billions of microscopic scales stacked like sets of roof tiles on the wings of the moth. She watched this flight of the immeasurable, of a holy epistle, a moth’s map of time, reading the text through the light waves hitting and bouncing off the ridges, ditches, the rivers and crossings contained in each scale.'
August 17, 2024
Satirical novels can usually be read in two ways, either looking for something that isn’t always there in each sentence, re-reading passages because there may be a hidden meaning therein, or just straight up, as it comes. In this, 750 page epic, I’d encourage the latter approach, as otherwise one needs to set aside a few weeks.
Specifically, it is the story of two brothers, 17 years old Aboriginal Sovereignty and 8 year old Tommyhawk, and, to a lesser extent, their parents, Cause Man and Dance Steel, who live in an unnamed Aboriginal community. The patriarch, Cause Man, is known the donkey man, as he has come up with a scheme to ease climate problems caused by vehicles by buying up every donkey he can find, there are 5 million feral donkeys in Australia, to transport people and goods around initially his locality, and eventually the whole country; indeed, to replace Qantas one day. Dance is known as the moth woman, as she follows butterfly songlines across the country, searching for a people smuggler to take her to China to trace her ancestral heritage.
This introduction to the community of Praiseworthy takes up about 70 pages, and is easy reading and quite humorous, but things then get much darker and more complicated.
8 year old Tommyhawk is a fascist, beaten up by social media into something of a mess, with an online existence more than an actual one. He despises his father and does what he can to get away from his family permanently. His older brother, named as Aboriginal Sovereignty as they were the words his father said the most, is a dancer and a boxer, with a 15 year old girl friend. He is informed on by Tommyhawk and taken into police custody for paedophilia. After which, he goes missing.
Once we get to know the children the lives of the parents fade into something of insignificance, such is Wright’s strength in writing about young people. The reader’s prime concern becomes what will happen to the children. That may be a strength of the novel, but it may also be a weakness. The underlying theme of it being a skit at Australian politics and bureaucracy become more concealed as the book continues. The disappearance and what subsequently happens to Aboriginal Sovereignty is so affecting that it is difficult to read as being allegorical.
There’s a lot to enjoy in the book, but ultimately it is a sad and nightmarish vision of the immediate future of an indigenous family who already have a grim existence. Reading it is a lengthy experience, not just because of its 700+ pages, but also because the language Wright uses is beautiful but complex. It is plot driven, but it may take 50 pages to move from one strand to the next, which is why if it is given time, as a whole it is an extremely rewarding experience.
Specifically, it is the story of two brothers, 17 years old Aboriginal Sovereignty and 8 year old Tommyhawk, and, to a lesser extent, their parents, Cause Man and Dance Steel, who live in an unnamed Aboriginal community. The patriarch, Cause Man, is known the donkey man, as he has come up with a scheme to ease climate problems caused by vehicles by buying up every donkey he can find, there are 5 million feral donkeys in Australia, to transport people and goods around initially his locality, and eventually the whole country; indeed, to replace Qantas one day. Dance is known as the moth woman, as she follows butterfly songlines across the country, searching for a people smuggler to take her to China to trace her ancestral heritage.
This introduction to the community of Praiseworthy takes up about 70 pages, and is easy reading and quite humorous, but things then get much darker and more complicated.
8 year old Tommyhawk is a fascist, beaten up by social media into something of a mess, with an online existence more than an actual one. He despises his father and does what he can to get away from his family permanently. His older brother, named as Aboriginal Sovereignty as they were the words his father said the most, is a dancer and a boxer, with a 15 year old girl friend. He is informed on by Tommyhawk and taken into police custody for paedophilia. After which, he goes missing.
Once we get to know the children the lives of the parents fade into something of insignificance, such is Wright’s strength in writing about young people. The reader’s prime concern becomes what will happen to the children. That may be a strength of the novel, but it may also be a weakness. The underlying theme of it being a skit at Australian politics and bureaucracy become more concealed as the book continues. The disappearance and what subsequently happens to Aboriginal Sovereignty is so affecting that it is difficult to read as being allegorical.
There’s a lot to enjoy in the book, but ultimately it is a sad and nightmarish vision of the immediate future of an indigenous family who already have a grim existence. Reading it is a lengthy experience, not just because of its 700+ pages, but also because the language Wright uses is beautiful but complex. It is plot driven, but it may take 50 pages to move from one strand to the next, which is why if it is given time, as a whole it is an extremely rewarding experience.
August 1, 2024
I don’t know how to properly convey what this book is and what it does. But it is and does a lot and I think if you are a lover of quality literature you should read this book. Incredible experience.
May 22, 2024
This book won the Stella Prize in 2024 and I cannot understand why. While there were some profound moments (a scene where a teacher defends a student from the police comes to mind) and some beautifully written passages, overall this book was long-winded and there was no payoff at the end for enduring over 700 pages with insufficient plot to keep me interested. The characters were pretty unlikeable too, which made it harder to care about what happened to them. The author had some important things to say but her messages got a bit lost amongst the repetitive prose. Ultimately this book did not deliver on what it promised and it did not get better as it went along. I endured it!
June 7, 2024
I got 30% of the way through 700 pages and realised that if I was tracking how many pages I made it through each night then I probably wasn’t enjoying it. I’m sure it’s a masterpiece but it was just to boring for me.
Shelved as 'abandoned'
May 19, 2023Stopped at page 50.
July 16, 2024
Another incredible work by Alexis Wright. About serious subjects but not necessarily taking itself seriously. There seems to be a lot of repetition in the text almost like a chant, similar to indigenous songs. Sharp-witted and subversive.
The naming of characters, cleverly makes reference to what is happening, not only in indigenous society, but also society as a whole.
The madcap ways that one member of the town comes up with to take advantage of climate change, the madcap response to government dog-whistling about child abuse in indigenous communities, made me wonder if they are any more or less madcap than what actually has taken place.
The dialogue and interactions between the characters are terrific and came across really well in the audiobook.
It's probably amongst one of the best things I've ever read but I could probably have done without some of the repetition that seemed to make the book longer than necessary. If it wasn't such a tome, I'd be picking it up for a reread very soon, but unfortunately I can't imagine doing it for some time.
The naming of characters, cleverly makes reference to what is happening, not only in indigenous society, but also society as a whole.
The madcap ways that one member of the town comes up with to take advantage of climate change, the madcap response to government dog-whistling about child abuse in indigenous communities, made me wonder if they are any more or less madcap than what actually has taken place.
The dialogue and interactions between the characters are terrific and came across really well in the audiobook.
It's probably amongst one of the best things I've ever read but I could probably have done without some of the repetition that seemed to make the book longer than necessary. If it wasn't such a tome, I'd be picking it up for a reread very soon, but unfortunately I can't imagine doing it for some time.
July 26, 2024
Incredible.
August 10, 2023
"Planet scowled. He hated that skulk walk. He had a gutful of seeing kids walking their own country like black fugitives, but knew these were the ones who had travelled far in the country of nightmares, and as he intuitively picked all truths from his walk, he knew that this son had slipped beyond his reach."
"They asked him if he knew what this felt like, of how the have-nots dotted all around the planet experienced loss of destiny and their Aboriginal Sovereignty. Could he imagine the unimaginable scale of loss as they did and he thought he had, did he know the loss of all the millions of children enduring endless wars, forced migration, homelessness, famine, drought, greenhouse gas emissions, firestorms and rising seas, their future robbed? Did he know how to stop these things happening, because this was what a government employee should know how to stop, otherwise he was just swindling poor people like them by being paid on false pretences to drive that flash Avis rent-a-car around their community for nothing."
"In a world that does not change, the stories of all times continued to be told, and were serenading though the winds, and in the stillness across country, their fulness in truthfulness, never forgotten. "
This may not be the apocalyptic novel we deserve, but it is certainly the one we need. Praiseworthy is a triumph - an epic of breathtaking scope, packed tight with riches - satire, allegory, slapstick, wordplay, allegory and poetry - with characters larger than life and yet perfectly human-sized. It is belly-laugh funny, can't stop giggling funny, and yet so heartbreakingly sad at its heart, a book saturated with grief. That's not to mention the awe and the majesty. It is a lot, and the book feels like a lot. It is best savoured, and Wright rewards trust from the reader.
Some of it is so clever, it makes me want to write about it even at the risk of reduction. Wright eases you in with a hilarious first hundred pages or so, largely concerned with donkeys before the story moves to its more difficult themes. Some spoilers for the first 20% of the book follow.
The novel centres around one family in the homelands town of Praiseworthy. Each of the four central figures functions symbolically and as a character, often at the same time. One, Aboriginal Sovereignty, a 17-year-old boy accused of sex crimes for loving a 15-year-old, walks into the ocean to commit suicide, egged on by his 8-year-old brother Tommyhawk. Wright uses this event to explore, play with, satirise and critique contemporary politics/society, but also never loses sight that these are children and the tragedy of their loss (in different ways) for the whole community. She makes us feel this grief, eschewing ex machina solutions. There is a weariness almost beyond anger at the outrageous pile of crap Praiseworthy's residents must navigate, the demonisation of Aboriginal men, the bind of Basics Cards, work for the dole and other measures imposed through the Intervention and similar. Her people, even Dance, who focuses on joy through moths, are far too humanly flawed to neatly resolve the stupidly high number of challenges they live with (Wright gives her characters dignity not because they are heroic, but because they are human, demanding we want better for them without needing them to be superhuman). Ancestral spirits are arcane and unpredictable.
Similarly, Wright has just great fun with climate change, and the haze that blankets the town (I particularly enjoyed the cultural tourism bit) but never lets the reader lose sight of the reality that the characters can't breathe, of the stench and decay. This is a book about living in our times - the kind of living done by those who don't often get their stories told - and the absurdity, the beauty, the inexplicability of it all. And it really is magnificent.
"They asked him if he knew what this felt like, of how the have-nots dotted all around the planet experienced loss of destiny and their Aboriginal Sovereignty. Could he imagine the unimaginable scale of loss as they did and he thought he had, did he know the loss of all the millions of children enduring endless wars, forced migration, homelessness, famine, drought, greenhouse gas emissions, firestorms and rising seas, their future robbed? Did he know how to stop these things happening, because this was what a government employee should know how to stop, otherwise he was just swindling poor people like them by being paid on false pretences to drive that flash Avis rent-a-car around their community for nothing."
"In a world that does not change, the stories of all times continued to be told, and were serenading though the winds, and in the stillness across country, their fulness in truthfulness, never forgotten. "
This may not be the apocalyptic novel we deserve, but it is certainly the one we need. Praiseworthy is a triumph - an epic of breathtaking scope, packed tight with riches - satire, allegory, slapstick, wordplay, allegory and poetry - with characters larger than life and yet perfectly human-sized. It is belly-laugh funny, can't stop giggling funny, and yet so heartbreakingly sad at its heart, a book saturated with grief. That's not to mention the awe and the majesty. It is a lot, and the book feels like a lot. It is best savoured, and Wright rewards trust from the reader.
Some of it is so clever, it makes me want to write about it even at the risk of reduction. Wright eases you in with a hilarious first hundred pages or so, largely concerned with donkeys before the story moves to its more difficult themes. Some spoilers for the first 20% of the book follow.
The novel centres around one family in the homelands town of Praiseworthy. Each of the four central figures functions symbolically and as a character, often at the same time. One, Aboriginal Sovereignty, a 17-year-old boy accused of sex crimes for loving a 15-year-old, walks into the ocean to commit suicide, egged on by his 8-year-old brother Tommyhawk. Wright uses this event to explore, play with, satirise and critique contemporary politics/society, but also never loses sight that these are children and the tragedy of their loss (in different ways) for the whole community. She makes us feel this grief, eschewing ex machina solutions. There is a weariness almost beyond anger at the outrageous pile of crap Praiseworthy's residents must navigate, the demonisation of Aboriginal men, the bind of Basics Cards, work for the dole and other measures imposed through the Intervention and similar. Her people, even Dance, who focuses on joy through moths, are far too humanly flawed to neatly resolve the stupidly high number of challenges they live with (Wright gives her characters dignity not because they are heroic, but because they are human, demanding we want better for them without needing them to be superhuman). Ancestral spirits are arcane and unpredictable.
Similarly, Wright has just great fun with climate change, and the haze that blankets the town (I particularly enjoyed the cultural tourism bit) but never lets the reader lose sight of the reality that the characters can't breathe, of the stench and decay. This is a book about living in our times - the kind of living done by those who don't often get their stories told - and the absurdity, the beauty, the inexplicability of it all. And it really is magnificent.
November 18, 2023
An elegy for aboriginal sovereignty, full of fantastical, spiritual song lines and metaphor. It’s a hard slog, a re-reading and considering of an almost apocalyptic climate disaster within a post-colonial wasteland, filled with glorious imagery and language so poetic yet raw it at makes you here guffaw, here gasp & often, there, suddenly weep. Human, dancer, somewhere in between? I am a slow reader, and this book is not easy: harder than the masterpiece Capricornia, but worth every day of the three and a half months (yes, three & a half fucking months), it took me to wade through it, soaked with exhaustion, covered in an emotional dusty haze, drowned in a deep sadness.
July 30, 2024
DNF at 51%. I can see it's clever, I can appreciate there is some beauty in the lyrical language and the rambling, dreamlike not-quite-stream of consciousness narration, I can compare it to the out of sequence satire of Catch-22 and agree it's probably worthy of awards. But it's just too long and repetitive, and elements that are funny at first, like the main character's farcical attempts to round up every donkey in Australia as an alternative to cars or the punning on the name of the character Aboriginal Sovereignty so you never know if they mean the person, the concept or both, just outstay their welcome by scores and scores of pages.
July 29, 2024
All the superlatives about this are spot on. It’s clever and complex and a powerful inditement against colonialism and demands for assimilation. On a sentence by sentence level the writing is sublime. But it also illustrated how my reading needs have changed - in the past I would have lapped it up, but now, as much as I appreciated it, I often found it hard-going and frequently frustrating. Still hugely enjoyable but I think I can only take this kind of thing in shorter form these days - more an assessment of me than the book. Undoubtedly a work of genius but too much so for me now…
April 6, 2024
DNF.
This took a LOT to read the first few chapters. I enjoyed it but can’t handle this for another 600 pages. I may come back.
This took a LOT to read the first few chapters. I enjoyed it but can’t handle this for another 600 pages. I may come back.
April 7, 2024
Gobsmacking work of genius tbh !!
July 10, 2024
tl;dr in wright’s dense, monstrous, and imposing masterpiece of void-black humor and apocalyptic paranoia, the beyond-dysfunctional family at the center of Praiseworthy reflect the struggles of a people facing its end under white supremacy
“The forward plan only had one purpose, to move the entire Aboriginal world of grief into white prosperity.” (460)
There’s nothing I love more than a contemporary dysfunctional family drama from multiple perspectives, from Franzen’s incredible Freedom, to Paul Murray’s knockout The Bee Sting; from Nathan Hill’s Wellness to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. What makes these books incredible are their ability to balance the characters’ desires, the cultural aspirations of the family unit, and the time + place around the family, creating a full and holistic picture of existence in the era. For this reader, such stories never get old.
Praiseworthy comes in, donkey-kicking the idea of the contemporary family drama square in the head, leaving it dizzy and disoriented. This novel is quite difficult to read, its prose feels circular and repetitive, and for me is hardly what I would call ‘enjoyable’; frequently, bad things befall the characters, which nearly match the foolishness/futility of their own desires. Wright’s writing style is absolutely unhinged, combining the paranoia of Pynchon and the syntactic play of Rushdie. All of this comes together to a single, almost unbearable and staggering reading experience, one which feels a lot like the Steel family patriarch Cause Man/Planet/Widespread’s quest to find the perfect platinum donkey.
One of the most notable things about Praiseworthy’s storytelling style is that there are very few actual scenes. I attribute this to the fact that each of the book’s chapters is told by a different Oracle (unsure if it’s citizens of Praiseworthy, or some beings from beyond, or perhaps an omniscient communal voice). The effect is disorienting, timeless, freewheeling. I can’t think of another book, especially of this length, that lacked any actual scenes – even a novel like Ducks, Newburyport, whose consciousness flowed like endless, furious rushes of water, contained memorable scenes, fragments of time in its endless barrage of narrative detritus involving characters that I can parse out and differentiate. In Praiseworthy time is collapsed, encircled, stretched out, but not in the Virginia Woolf fashion. We’re not in anyone’s heads, really. The narrators/oracles are terrifyingly omniscient, and we are tapped into the very heart of Praiseworthy at all times. It’s really hard to explain and even put a finger on – it’s like the many faces, the unnamed entities who narrate Toni Morrison’s Jazz, except in Praiseworthy they barely feel of the Earth.
"The collective voice of the little people of Praiseworthy orbited across the biosphere, and demanded to know from the faraway police, the enforcers of law from thousands of miles away, what their human rights were worth from roughly zero, to one hundred percent." (381)
I was utterly hypnotized by this storytelling style. The first 150 pages of Praiseworthy center mostly on Cause Man Steel, on the search for the aforementioned equid, in full belief that the gods themselves have appointed him on this quest to save his people. You almost believe him, given his zeal and unflinching devotion to his goal, but the book’s portrayal of this father-figure constantly wavers between a sense of triumph and utter embarrassment – later we see the way he treats his family, particularly his children, and it’s absolutely despicable. But it’s circular. The journey feeds itself, which feeds into the community, which feeds into the haze looming over the community, which feeds into the journey, and so on and so forth. Wright depicts the cycle of this community, one that feels deadly, almost suicidal – Major Mayor/Icepick believes that the way forward for the people of Praiseworthy is shameless assimilation. Cause Man Steel believes in his donkeys. Dance, Cause Man’s wife, doesn’t believe her husband. The kids are split on the issue, so much so that one of the children, hellbent on killing himself by walking into the ocean, is named Aboriginal Sovereignty.
This is the essence of the story of Praiseworthy: aboriginal sovereignty itself, in the face of white supremacy, must assimilate or die. The conflicting ideologies that drive the circular problem of Praiseworthy lead to individuals becoming figures for change, rather than change itself, as seen by Tommyhawk’s obsession with his “White Mother”, or Major Mayor/Ice Pick/Lolly’s firm pro-assimilation stance, which attracts a harem of Praiseworthy women in his wake. Wright basically sums up the end result of placing all your hopes on a single person:
“They thought having a vision to save culture should be second nature, that any of their superheroes should know how to successfully implement a vision for saving their culture from catastrophic destruction, and here they were, just with another ordinary visionary that nobody liked because he was as powerless as they were as far as they could see, for he had saved nothing, not even them.” (604)
From page 1, Praiseworthy threatens to explode. The immediate effect of Wright’s prose is electrifying, bewildering, and completely new to me, and the tone and insanity-inducing effect of reading this book spirals and spirals and stays insane up to the very very final words. I haven’t experienced anything like Praiseworthy, from its singular setting, to Wright’s completely idiosyncratic authorial voice. The pages scream with frustration, with desperation, with hopelessness, and in this satirical rendering of a people-at-its-end, Wright shows us, close-up, the sheer absurdity of existence, not just as a First Nations citizen of Australia, but under the global eternal pandemic of white supremacy.
“The forward plan only had one purpose, to move the entire Aboriginal world of grief into white prosperity.” (460)
There’s nothing I love more than a contemporary dysfunctional family drama from multiple perspectives, from Franzen’s incredible Freedom, to Paul Murray’s knockout The Bee Sting; from Nathan Hill’s Wellness to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. What makes these books incredible are their ability to balance the characters’ desires, the cultural aspirations of the family unit, and the time + place around the family, creating a full and holistic picture of existence in the era. For this reader, such stories never get old.
Praiseworthy comes in, donkey-kicking the idea of the contemporary family drama square in the head, leaving it dizzy and disoriented. This novel is quite difficult to read, its prose feels circular and repetitive, and for me is hardly what I would call ‘enjoyable’; frequently, bad things befall the characters, which nearly match the foolishness/futility of their own desires. Wright’s writing style is absolutely unhinged, combining the paranoia of Pynchon and the syntactic play of Rushdie. All of this comes together to a single, almost unbearable and staggering reading experience, one which feels a lot like the Steel family patriarch Cause Man/Planet/Widespread’s quest to find the perfect platinum donkey.
One of the most notable things about Praiseworthy’s storytelling style is that there are very few actual scenes. I attribute this to the fact that each of the book’s chapters is told by a different Oracle (unsure if it’s citizens of Praiseworthy, or some beings from beyond, or perhaps an omniscient communal voice). The effect is disorienting, timeless, freewheeling. I can’t think of another book, especially of this length, that lacked any actual scenes – even a novel like Ducks, Newburyport, whose consciousness flowed like endless, furious rushes of water, contained memorable scenes, fragments of time in its endless barrage of narrative detritus involving characters that I can parse out and differentiate. In Praiseworthy time is collapsed, encircled, stretched out, but not in the Virginia Woolf fashion. We’re not in anyone’s heads, really. The narrators/oracles are terrifyingly omniscient, and we are tapped into the very heart of Praiseworthy at all times. It’s really hard to explain and even put a finger on – it’s like the many faces, the unnamed entities who narrate Toni Morrison’s Jazz, except in Praiseworthy they barely feel of the Earth.
"The collective voice of the little people of Praiseworthy orbited across the biosphere, and demanded to know from the faraway police, the enforcers of law from thousands of miles away, what their human rights were worth from roughly zero, to one hundred percent." (381)
I was utterly hypnotized by this storytelling style. The first 150 pages of Praiseworthy center mostly on Cause Man Steel, on the search for the aforementioned equid, in full belief that the gods themselves have appointed him on this quest to save his people. You almost believe him, given his zeal and unflinching devotion to his goal, but the book’s portrayal of this father-figure constantly wavers between a sense of triumph and utter embarrassment – later we see the way he treats his family, particularly his children, and it’s absolutely despicable. But it’s circular. The journey feeds itself, which feeds into the community, which feeds into the haze looming over the community, which feeds into the journey, and so on and so forth. Wright depicts the cycle of this community, one that feels deadly, almost suicidal – Major Mayor/Icepick believes that the way forward for the people of Praiseworthy is shameless assimilation. Cause Man Steel believes in his donkeys. Dance, Cause Man’s wife, doesn’t believe her husband. The kids are split on the issue, so much so that one of the children, hellbent on killing himself by walking into the ocean, is named Aboriginal Sovereignty.
This is the essence of the story of Praiseworthy: aboriginal sovereignty itself, in the face of white supremacy, must assimilate or die. The conflicting ideologies that drive the circular problem of Praiseworthy lead to individuals becoming figures for change, rather than change itself, as seen by Tommyhawk’s obsession with his “White Mother”, or Major Mayor/Ice Pick/Lolly’s firm pro-assimilation stance, which attracts a harem of Praiseworthy women in his wake. Wright basically sums up the end result of placing all your hopes on a single person:
“They thought having a vision to save culture should be second nature, that any of their superheroes should know how to successfully implement a vision for saving their culture from catastrophic destruction, and here they were, just with another ordinary visionary that nobody liked because he was as powerless as they were as far as they could see, for he had saved nothing, not even them.” (604)
From page 1, Praiseworthy threatens to explode. The immediate effect of Wright’s prose is electrifying, bewildering, and completely new to me, and the tone and insanity-inducing effect of reading this book spirals and spirals and stays insane up to the very very final words. I haven’t experienced anything like Praiseworthy, from its singular setting, to Wright’s completely idiosyncratic authorial voice. The pages scream with frustration, with desperation, with hopelessness, and in this satirical rendering of a people-at-its-end, Wright shows us, close-up, the sheer absurdity of existence, not just as a First Nations citizen of Australia, but under the global eternal pandemic of white supremacy.
Read
October 10, 2024epic in length, weight & density, and i would know because i've carried it around in my bag every day for two months straight. prose so rich and so dense this book took me over two months to read – an average of 10 pages a day... demands much of the reader but repays you awesomely for your dedication. a totally singular book
January 26, 2024
Our Review...
Set in the fictional community of “tidy town award winning” Praiseworthy, Wright’s novel is the story emerging from a “haze” afflicting the country that represents a plethora of issues from the intergenerational trauma of Aboriginal people and the comfortable ignorance of modern day white Australia to the environmental devastation of the Anthropocene and ongoing disaster of climate change.
Every character in Wright’s novel is so much more than a character; they are all metaphors for the deep connections to the lands the Aboriginal people have taken care of for over 80000 years and the complex, nuanced, and individual battles Aboriginal people still face for recognition in a modern Australian society still intent on forgetting and assimilating. (Made even more poignant the referendum of 2023).
This is so much more than a novel. More than an epic. Zeitgeist comes close but still falls short of what Alexis Wright has achieved in Praiseworthy. Wright’s amalgamation of historical fiction, personal tragedy and farce with elegiac prose that champions the Dreamtime, Songlines and the tradition of oral storytelling is inimitable.
It has been said that, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” In this way, Wright’s epic is everything art and literature can and should be.
Not just my book of the year for 2023, this takes a place in my Top 10 of all time.
Review by Katina @ Great Escape Books
Set in the fictional community of “tidy town award winning” Praiseworthy, Wright’s novel is the story emerging from a “haze” afflicting the country that represents a plethora of issues from the intergenerational trauma of Aboriginal people and the comfortable ignorance of modern day white Australia to the environmental devastation of the Anthropocene and ongoing disaster of climate change.
Every character in Wright’s novel is so much more than a character; they are all metaphors for the deep connections to the lands the Aboriginal people have taken care of for over 80000 years and the complex, nuanced, and individual battles Aboriginal people still face for recognition in a modern Australian society still intent on forgetting and assimilating. (Made even more poignant the referendum of 2023).
This is so much more than a novel. More than an epic. Zeitgeist comes close but still falls short of what Alexis Wright has achieved in Praiseworthy. Wright’s amalgamation of historical fiction, personal tragedy and farce with elegiac prose that champions the Dreamtime, Songlines and the tradition of oral storytelling is inimitable.
It has been said that, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” In this way, Wright’s epic is everything art and literature can and should be.
Not just my book of the year for 2023, this takes a place in my Top 10 of all time.
Review by Katina @ Great Escape Books
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