Reviews

• I think this is a masterpiece; the sentences are sensational, the scope is panoramic, the subject matter profound and real, the feel for landscape and inner emotional life unsurpassed. Alex Miller is a far finer, far more honest, and ultimately more important writer of our times, and of the darkness at the heart of humanity, than the modish and increasingly rhetorical Cormac McCarthy, and this novel will stand as one of the best of the century.

• Beautifully written with such descriptiveness one can almost smell the gum leaves and the land. This author really can pull one into the story with him. His characters are so believable , what a talent.

• Absolutely phenomenal read and a fantastic work of fiction highlighting the effects that colonialism has had on Australia and our first peoples.

• Second read; this occassion on my Kindle. (Still prefer reading traditional books.) A compelling and interesting historical faction. Black man, white woman; an interesting twist. A lasting impression of country and characters.

• Miller writes about identities: what shapes he identity of a nation and a person. His particular concern here is the identity of Australia, its white settlers and its indigenous people. A university teacher and a former horse wrangler have the task of deciding which aspects of the past, recent and ancient, need to be preserved - artefacts and natural phenomena, but also hatreds, bitterness , affections. The novel is a meditation about changing Australia's understanding of itself, and for non-Aborigine readers, how we might understand the way time, experience and understanding are processed by people from a different but also contemporaneous culture. The novel is structured by a journey the protagonists make through the Northern Territory. Detailed descriptions of landscape and flora and fauna, some of which is not accessible to this English reader, but the intensity of feeling and otherness is conveyed powerfully. without collapsing completely into mysticism The central male character, half Aborigine, half white, is hard to accept at some level. Despite Miller's intention the 'noble savage' stereotype comes up from the back of the mind as we read about his silences and his gestures towards the country which gives rise to his sensibility. There is also a Lawrentian feel to his relationship to the 'overcivilised' woman, fleeing from her even more articulate and self-deceiving husband. But this response might be ineluctable when the ambition of the novel is set against the limitations of this reader. Who else but Miller offers so much on both a grand an an intimate scale ? If you haven't read any of Miller's novels, this may not be the best place to begin. On the other hand, why not read any book by one of the best writers alive? Though you may have to care about Australia to agree.

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