I really liked this book. I also think it is a good book, which is of course not the same thing. It’s lyrical, dreamlike, almost mythic at times, evocative and free of cliche. Stow’s prose is a times poetic (he was a poet), and his characters speak with directness and honesty real people don’t often use, and they do so to address issues — love, purpose, hope — that real people often avoid confronting. So while the town of Tourmaline is evoked with clarity and power, the book is not, on the whole, realist. Every town is full of people struggling to make sense of their life and their choices; in Tourmaline, they articulate that.
The plot? A man, almost dead from exposure in the desert, is brought into town by the monthly lorry that brings supplies. The town — a dozen people, perhaps, who hang on while the town decays — gather round to gawk, help, wonder or just observe. He heals. He says his name is Michael Random, which no-one believes but no-one questions. He says he is a water diviner — in a town that is desiccating day by day, year by year, that looks across a salt lake, whose oldest inhabitants (like our narrator) are the only ones who can remember it raining. He fascinates them. Each reacts to him, and to his effect on the others, in their own way.
The narration is unusual; first person, but… The story is told by the town policeman — but he narrates episodes for which he has only hearsay, invention or later reports. He admits as much. On the whole, it works very well.
The wider context — there is none, or very little. A somewhat odd author’s note tells us the story takes place in the future, making it, by some definitions, and a few little hints in the text that all is not well in the wider world, possibly a post-apocalyptic novel, though you would not call it science fiction. It may well be climate fiction — we can imagine the arid Tourmaline as what is left after the rain patterns move south (as they will in Australia) in a warming world.
In feel, the closest you might get is J G Ballard’s disaster novels, like The Drowned World or The Crystal World, where the protagonists embrace the strange new world and plough on into it (instead of running away) at the behest of some unexplained but oddly believable internal need.
I think this is a terrific Australian novel. Subject to its depiction of Indigenous Australians being acceptable to Indigenous Australians, which I cannot answer, I’d like to see it being much more widely known; at least as much as the works of Patrick White or Tim Winton.
DSPACE 