Dusk
Like Limberlost , Robbie Arnott’s latest novel Dusk has a small cast of characters, close siblings and a wild animal at the heart of the quest. (Here not a caged native quoll but an imported menace: a South American puma). [My thoughts on Limberlost , here ]. James Bradley compares Arnott’s prose to Cormac McCarthy, with its ‘pared-back textures’ ( Guardian , 2024). Ned Hirst sees the novel as ‘an adventure story [which] contains the narrative momentum to match Australian Beowulf’ ( Meanjin , 2024). I thought of something closer in time and place: Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains , with its mythic landscape, its allegorical cartographical suggestions and its gentrified landowners. Iris and Floyd are children of convicts – adult orphans, nomadic and symbiotic twins. Arnott introduces them as curiosities on page 4: Their names were Iris and Floyd Renshaw, and they were both thirty-seven years old … Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and ...