DUSK, fourth Tasmania-set novel by Tasmanian author extraordinaire Robbie Arnott

DUSK
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of North Woods and The Vaster Wilds, Dusk is a propulsive, moody, and atmospheric take on the Western.

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined.

And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Do you remember my review of Flames? The debut novel from this author, I gave it all five stars six years ago. I'm still amazed how few people look at the tabs on the top bar, so it seems most of y'all missed my reviews of Limberlost and The Rain Heron, so I'm reposting them tomorrow as regular-blog posts. I'll carry on warbling about Author Arnott's prose and his evocations of a natural world I wish to hell I saw and felt as keenly as he does when I went outside, eg "They left at dawn, heading north-west, the steam of their horses cutting through the harshly cold air as they rode across frosted paddocks that soon gave way to plains of soft, snow-dusted buttongrass. The sun slanted onto their backs but did not warm them," from this story.

I badly want you to join me in the world of Arnott stans because he really puts in the work to make wonderful stories, in the older and current senses of that word. I think that merits our time and our treasure. The rewards for spending a bit of both in his quiet, unshowy company are many.

So, this latest novel: It's a Western, in the US sense, that follows twin brother and sister as they make a desperate attempt to eke out survival in a world harsher and less tolerant than we privileged computer-users have ever known. Offspring of a pair transported to distant Tasmania for absurdly trivial "crimes" (efforts to remain alive, really), the Renshaw twins had no chance of an "honest" start in life. They were trained up to thievery. Their long-since executed parents left them to fend for themselves and so they have.

Now, though, the life they were bred to lead has finally snapped shut the social trap of antisocial activity. Rob and cheat your neighbors long enough, they'll stop affording you the chance to do it. This is where we meet Iris and Floyd.

The desperation of hunger drives these parasites on the Body Politic to pursue a cockamamie plan to kill for a bounty a puma that's attacking shepherds in Tasmania's wild back-of-beyond meadows. How these very urban people will accomplish this...let's say I was never convinced it was a *good* plan, but everyone needs a plan, and some hope, for how to survive.

The fully risen sun built a morning of cold colour, of ripped clouds, sharp light washing onto wet wool and frosted fields. It afforded the twins a confidence that they hadn’t felt the previous day. With the sun unshielded, the mist absent, the land was robbed of menace. The river was no longer haunting but placid; the twisted trees appeared graceful and stoic in their contortions; the listless shepherds now seemed merely apathetic, rather than mysterious or threatening.

What strikes me in that passage is how one can read it as beautiful sentences; as simile on several levels; as Western-genre foreshadowing of developments. I always love writing that lets me in, that is roomy enough for my imagination to work on the beautiful imagery and its story direction. Like Cormac McCarthy before him, Author Arnott's playing an old instrument in a different way (though not a nihilistic one, I'll hasten to reassure those not fond of ol' Cormac's grimfests).

Iris and Dusk, the female protagonists of this story, and each driven by the actions of men to fight for their very survival against those men simply to sustain their lives. If that's not a metaphor for late-stage capitalism's effects on feminism, I do not know what is. It was not until I finished the book and sat mulling it over that I found this in its substance. Of course, I rest atop a Himalaya of old white male privilege so no tellin' how much faster women will see it...but there it is, Iris needs to survive, Dusk does too, they have to protect those unable to do so for themselves (Floyd's got what I expect is scoliosis and is crippled by it).

Their collision is inevitable. It is primal, cataclysmic. It is the conflict of colonials in a country that they've taken as their own (pumas are placental mammals, not one of which is native to Australia), and Author Arnott makes sure to give us this stonking clue in the form of Lydia's Aboriginal voice. It should be no surprise to anyone that Lydia, the bosslady of a crew of peat-cutters, is our voice given to those still more denied a place than colonializers' women are.

And yet, and yet...read through a US lens, this story's incongruities with actual Tasmanian colonial history (Outback cattle barons become sheep barons and never, for all I know, crudesced into the place) are all in service of Author Arnott's career-long cutting of Tasmania's story-cloth to suit the pattern of story he wants to tell. I myownself think he does a truly wonderful job of it; he tells his wonderful story, simple survival of females in a world colonized and exploited by men, with the enhancements and alterations of a talented imagination.

I'd argue it starts too slowly for its eventual pace, and permaybehaps the ending is "too open" for many readers (though not for me, I like the story to head off into the sunset without me when there's as much to think over as there is here), so I'm not quit at the full-five point.

Damn close, though. It's another exercise in superior storytelling by an established superior storyteller.