ROBBIE ARNOTT'S PAGE: LIMBERLOST; and THE RAIN HERON—don't miss out on a major talent

LIMBERLOST
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron{review below}, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dual timelines of Ned's life: the summer he was seventeen, at the end of WWII, as he works himself ragged to earn the money to buy a small boat; and the rueful musings of his old-man self, on that passage: "He suddenly felt very old. Felt the distance between his youth and what he was now. He flexed his wrists, touched his face, wondered if the troubled boy of that summer would recognize the man he'd become."

We all wonder that, Ned; no one moreso than a man whose life spread before him and then happened to him. Summer of that seventeenth year starts in his childhood memories with the appearance out of nowhere of a whale at the mouth of the river nearby. This whale is wreaking havoc, destroying boats and lives, all very dramatic thus certain to appeal to an adolescent and fire his dreams of boat ownership and its promise of escape, of freedom. That is always the illusion, isn't it. Young men urgently need to escape from their lives. Not so much of course, that Ned takes on the care and healing of an injured quoll, a cat-sized marsupial that didn't make it unscathed around Tasmania' settler-colonial farms (in Ned's case, an apple orchard called Limberlost). Ned's squeamish discomfort with killing even the verminous introduced rabbits hes hunting to provide pelts for slouch hats, Aussie soldiers' signature headgear means he commits to returning the quoll to health and its natural home.

Unlike the other stories from Author Arnott, this one has no tint of magical realism. It's a strong historical story, one that moves us into the waning years of an Australian colonial reality that was consciously reshaped beginning in the 1970s. That reshaping, which redressed in small ways moving towards larger ones the horrors that the settler colonials unleashed on Aboriginal Australians and the fauna of the continent, has its other face examined here. Ned has spent his entire existence working, the land that supports human life has received his best and tenderest care; now he must confront the way that looks to his own children: "He realized his recollections might not be as clear as he'd assumed. It was a horrible sensation, feeling that the facts of his life had blurred. He wondered if his past was slipping away?"

As it must, Ned. As it will away from us all.

The beauty of Author Arnott's prose makes this a read to savor for me; its focus on a man in his terminal decline to oblivion rethinking his life appeals to me in its deep familiarity.

I've reworked this review from its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab. I've added links to definitions.

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THE RAIN HERON
ROBBIE ARNOTT
FSG Originals (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

The Rain Heron is the dizzying, dazzling new novel from the author of Flames.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "So much was ruined, either slowly or in red instants, and nothing was getting better and nobody was doing enough about it. And through the quiet carnage of the world I kept moving." A fascinating story made up of absences, of clothing not worn, of things not happening, of eyes unseeing. A novel centering absences sounds...unsatisfying. I can only advise you to trust Author Arnott, read the story, and see if my rating holds true for you, as well.

“A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain, it would not sprout If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them). Success and happiness were foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to go to bed unhungry. All she had was her hunger and her farm—and her farm, as far as she could tell, wanted her to starve.”

When an author creates a mythos for a place that has one well-known to most readers of English-language prose, we call it a retelling. What, then, is the word for Author Arnott's mythmaking for this exceedingly ancient land that Europeans don't know the mythos of, whose history is older than ours by many millennia, and yet it settles onto the mindspace of the people now there seamlessly? "When I first saw the bird burst into its high grotto, when I watched its dance of wet light, I was mesmerised by it. Then it took my eye, and that feeling was replaced by terror, and with the terror came extraordinary pain, as I felt the icicle of its beak pierce the jellied rim of my eyeball."

I don't really know but that's where we are.

“Paddling nearer, they saw that it was the unlucky farmer, dead or unconscious, her body draped over the branches like a nightgown hung out to dry. But more curious than this was what they saw next: a huge heron, the colour of rain, suddenly emerging from the flood in a fast, steep flight, leaving not even a ripple on the water beneath it. With a languid flap of its wings it came to rest in the crown of the oak, standing over the unlucky farmer, as if on guard.

The teenagers brought their boat to a stop. This water-risen heron was unlike any other they’d seen before—any other heron, any other living creature. Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird. Its body was pierced by strands of dusky light, and the tree was clearly visible directly behind its sharp, moist beak.

A ghost, one claimed. A mirage, said another. But before they could get closer the heron hunched its neck, flapped its wings and leapt into the sky. A thick spray of water fell from its wings, far more water than could have been resting on its feathers. Then it disappeared into the remnants of the storm.

Absences and spaces and takings-away and lacks...all make this near-future dystopian in an unflashy, unbombastic unnervingly real way. It could be that, as the 2025 US regime unleashes its evil agenda on the world, this feels too on-the-nose in the way that validates its rightness and essential truth-telling.

Why do they want it?
Who?
The generals or whoever’s in charge.
Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.

Nowhere in the text are there quotation marks or suchlike civilizing indicators. It's an effective technique for a post-apocalyptic story made of takings-away and spaces where things once were or might have been. Its message is "do more with less, things are not what they were, get used to providing things you're used to getting."

The Rain Heron does not come on demand.

I've reposted this review its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab.