Literary Remembering Babylon by David Malouf

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Hope you enjoy it Caleb. The book repays rereading, as I was able to appreciate it all the more because I was not reading the story this time, but thinking more about the themes. Alongside the theme of language - the Aboriginal languages, the language of bees - there is also a theme about learning to see.

Australia must have been such an alien place for those first Europeans who settled here, and interestingly, it even took painters quite a long time to see what was really there in the landscape: early paintings look very European, in both the colours and the shapes of the trees for example.

I loved this passage where Jock noticed the tips of the grass he was walking through were beaded with green:

The person whose understanding is deepest is the minister, Mr Frazer, who learned from Gemmy the names and uses of various plants. He wrote in a report he gave to the Governor:

Later in the same document (which of course was ignored) he wrote of the need for the settlers to change themselves rather than trying to change the land. This is a lesson we still need to learn. For example, we farm cattle and sheep rather than the animals that live here and have adapted over thousands of years to cope with the climate and to find food.

A wonderful book I think.

I finished the book last weekend and have been thinking about it since then. I really enjoyed it. I liked the unique approach to the themes of fear and racial conflict through Gemmy's character as being "white but not white" and isolated/trapped between the two societies. You can really feel his sadness and loneliness. It's a less direct approach than A Secret River, for example.

It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly, and the encounter was an embrace.

I liked the lyrical writing, especially the passages about nature. I like your comments about "learning to see," Bookpossum.

I have mixed feelings about the leap ahead in time at the end of the book. It felt abrupt. Yet I liked knowing how their experience of reacting to Gemmy influenced their future lives. Therefore I think that this book could benefit from a rereading with this knowledge.

Caleb, thank you for the analysis of the title. As I was reading it was always on my mind to think about what the significance of the title was. It took awhile for the pieces to fit together for me. I like the way you summed up your perspective.

[sun surfer]

I enjoyed this. For its ultimately heavier subject matter and symbolic nature, it felt like a light book moving airily along while illuminating the various characters’ lives in and near the small outpost town. Thanks Bookpossum for originally nominating it.