Limberlost

 

It takes a certain skill to write a historical novel that feels present. And it takes craft and heart to make the story of one man’s life feel so important – not as representative of anything, but so that the reader can experience vicariously the trials, tribulations and triumphs of one human being. That human being, Ned, is placed in a landscape and a family – both play their parts to shape the character and the life his consciousness grapples with to find the right way to live.

Limberlost opens with the mythic scene of a whale believed to have ‘gone mad’, destroying boats at dusk. Five-year-old Ned is taken out to the mouth of the river by his father as he and his two brothers wait for the whale to ‘explode out of the river and paste them into the waves’ (pp. 1-3). Chapter 2 begins with a leap in time: ‘A decade later Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze’ (p. 5). So, a fifteen-year-old boy who desperately wishes to impress his distant father. Ned’s two older brothers are overseas fighting in the war; one is missing in action after the fall of Singapore. Chapter 3 jumps another decade; Ned has left Limberlost and is working as a foreman to a crew of foresters who wreak ‘violence’ on ancient hardwoods, ‘ghostly in colour and immense in height’ (p. 13). Arnott thus both tells the story of the life quickly (with a decade passing in a sentence) and slowly, as he focuses on one summer when Ned shoots rabbits and dreams of owning a sailing boat to take out on that mythic river.

One day, Ned’s sister Maggie (a troubled figure, dealing with her own sadness) shows Ned evidence that something has been at the chicken coop, and Ned lays another trap. In the process he captures a quoll, a native marsupial whose fur would bring a good price. The ‘great hunter’ hesitates, and instead of killing it with his boot (raised, heavy) he saves it, and hides it in a crate. This he keeps secret, as he does his motives for killing rabbits and saving his money. Having established that the story is of Ned’s whole life, Arnott draws the reader’s attention to the significance of such events by widening the camera lens:

The quoll followed him for years, its jaw gaping through his mind whenever he found terror and fury in the same place. It came to him when he watched a boy throw a rock at his mother in the main street of Beaconsfield. When, in a pub after a football match, he saw two drunk ruckmen brutalise each other on the whorled grains of a myrtle table … (p. 31).  

Similarly, the boat Ned acquires and selflessly parts with haunts him, as a thing of ‘uncommon beauty’ that resonates as an absence (‘There would now be no moment where his brothers would stand on the shore and watch him glide on the currents’ [p. 201]). Other moments are movingly expansive, such as his brother Bill’s unexpected return from the war, which Nick experiences as a ‘swelling … a hugeness that rang through him for the length of his life’ (p. 225). To say much more would be to potentially spoil the emotional impact of the final scenes of this short novel which achieves something similar – a ‘hugeness of feeling’ in a historical novel that feels like the present.