ALEXIS WRIGHT The Swan Book. Reviewed by Annette Hughes

Set in a dystopian future, The Swan Book is completely individual yet universal – polemical, poetic and grimly humorous, with multiverses of meaning. What a ride! The irresistible narrative force, the crackling idiosyncratic voice and the expansive, imaginative breadth of time and space of The Swan Book leave me breathless. What a brilliant, tragic and utterly beautiful thing Wright has made. Impossible to put down, The Swan Book is at least equal to, if not larger in its ambition than her award-winning Carpentaria. In that novel, Wright said that what she was searching for was  ‘an authentic literary voice that could traverse a continent and tell its inside stories to the outside world’. In The Swan Book, she appears to be in search of a language large enough to tell the whole world a story of global dimensions. Wright sets the novel up with a prelude, narrated in the first person by the protagonist, Oblivia: ‘Oblivion Ethyl(ene)’ officially. She talks about a ‘virus’ lodged in her mind and how no matter what, it will not be coaxed out:

… because the little king will not answer someone knocking … won’t talk about anything in level terms, or jump around to appease you … no matter how much knocking, trick-or-treating, ceremonial presents, or tantrums about why the door was kept closed.

There is a vast amount of information about the protagonist and framing of the story embedded in these opening pages – information absorbed subconsciously but which nevertheless informs the reading. Oblivia has been named by old Bella Donna, the white migrant woman who found her in a hollow tree root, and rescued her from the oblivion of being thought dead. The child had been raped by a pack of petrol-sniffing youths and, possibly as a result of the trauma, Oblivia is as dumb as the mute swans of Bella Donna’s stories from her distant European past. The addition of one small letter changes Olivia from a symbol of peace to a ‘feminisation’ of oblivion, which is the condition of being forgotten or disregarded, the state of being mentally withdrawn or blank – all of which perfectly describes her character, but there is something else. In law, oblivion means amnesty, pardon, an intentional overlooking, especially of political offences, which foreshadows one of the major themes of the book – the politics of place, sovereignty and belonging. The other name she is given is Ethel(ene), the name of a very active plant hormone which programs autumn leaves to change colour, wilt and drop and stimulates flowers to open and wither, and fruit to ripen. Like petroleum, it is one of the most important organic chemicals manufactured from crude oil and the building block for a vast range of other chemicals. Metaphorically, Oblivia is practically the kiss of death. Oblivia’s traumatic past is encoded in her name, which, like the virus in her brain, will not be dislodged easily. Nor can the poetic associations. She has the ability to watch her own mind at work. She has the capacity to distance herself from the reality of ‘life’ out there and observe the virus infecting her relationship to that reality. She recognises that the virus is a dreamer. The allusion to dreaming is reinforced by Bella Donna’s name. (The plant Atropa belladonna is commonly called deadly nightshade. Atropa is derived from the Greek goddess Atropos, one of the three Greek fates, who cuts the threads that determine the course of one’s life.) Witches were believed to use a mixture of belladonna and opium poppy to prepare flying ointment. More likely, these preparations were meant to encourage hallucinatory dreaming because the combination of alkaloids produces a dream-like waking state. The Harbourmaster, Oblivia’s first antagonist, is perhaps named with a nod to Mikhail Bulgakov’s beguiling Master and Margarita. Although often considered fantasy, this is also a scathing political commentary, as is The Swan Book (and there is more than a passing similarity between Behemoth the cat and a talking monkey). Like Bulgakov, Wright mashes up folktales with ‘reality’ to criticise the social order by turning it upside down. Everyone in The Swan Book is a refugee, a displaced person, a hostage to circumstance. That the whole world has become unstable forces the reader to acknowledge other possibilities outside their reality. Fairytales are a valuable challenge to authority for relatively powerless children, or a valve to release the pressure of living under severe constraints. Fantasy reminds us that life is miraculous, and that freedom to imagine and dream cannot be stolen from us, even under the most restrictive regimes. Wright has gone to a lot of trouble to foreshadow how the novel should be read: that it is perhaps all a fantasy in which Oblivia is Alice in reverse, pulled from a black hole of all-knowing oblivion to narrate this dystopian future, imagined entirely from the distorted perspective of Oblivia’s ‘diseased mind’. There has been a Black Swan Event and catastrophic climate change has sent hordes of Europeans packing – giving us a whole new understanding of boat people, as millions flee rising waters and wild weather. Bella Donna is one of these refugees and has arrived out of the blue of history like the black swans that have flocked to Oblivia’s swamp, in search of a place to be – to belong. Informed by the old woman’s folklore of white European swans, Oblivia attaches the old-world stories to the miraculous birds. She names them, invests them with meaning and makes herself their story-giver, although they never hear their names on her tongue. Bella Donna tries to teach her to speak and although everything she says is heard, Oblivia resolutely refuses to respond, as if saying the words will verify them and give the virus dominion over her mind. Even though her imagination has been colonised, Oblivia will not submit. She even states from the outset that her ‘quest is to regain sovereignty over [her] brain’. So, who is the narrator? Oblivia? Or the virus , kicking back on a ‘lolly pink couch’? Language is the virus that has taken up residence in Oblivia’s mind, an invasive tongue gleaned from everything she has experienced, every ‘foreign thing’ that has ever entered her head; a language formed from every sound she has ever heard. Oblivia speaks telepathically to the reader, using the language of the mind, which is never linear. Rather, it whispers in dream-speak – layered up imagery, poetic metaphor, stream-of-consciousness, snatches of half-remembered conversations and people whose voices seem to ‘jump out of the ground right in front of you’. There is spectacular beauty, terrible fear and loathing, compassion and revulsion, all clamouring for meaning. The Swan Book is a portrait of the inside of Oblivia’s mind – ‘a really big story of that ghost place: a really deadly love story about a girl who has a virus lover living in her brain’ – a vast, intricately constructed life of the mind forged in the last place you’d ever expect to find it: inside the imagination of a mute Aboriginal girl who refuses to speak because ‘what’s the point of speaking if no one will ever listen to you anyway’? It is said that the mute swan sings a beautiful song when it dies. Perhaps that is what The Swan Book is – Oblivia’s beautiful, black swan song, telling the whole sorry story of what she has lost, but also of what has been recorded and encoded by the virus so we may hear it. There are at least a dozen PhD theses in this astonishing work. It is completely individual and yet at the same time, universal. With its multiverses of meaning, passages of majestic poetry, polemic, and deadly black humour, The Swan Book is a polyphonous love song to country. Alexis Wright The Swan Book Giramondo 2013 PB 352pp $29.95 Annette Hughes is the author of Art Life Chooks and was for many years a literary agent with the Cameron Creswell Agency. She is now a manuscript assessor. You can buy this book from Abbey’s here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.  

Tags: Alexis | Wright, Australian fiction, Australian women's writing, Black Swan Event, Carpentaria, Mikhail | Bulgakov