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.

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

DUSK
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED for 2026's The Climate Fiction Prize.

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.

FLAMES, Tasmanian debut author Robbie Arnott's full-tilt dive into magical realism, is a must-read!

FLAMES
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘A strange and joyous marvel.’ Richard Flanagan

A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte—who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.

The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island that takes us full circle.

Flames sings out with joy and sadness. Utterly original in conception, spellbinding in its descriptions of nature and its celebration of the power of language, it announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in contemporary fiction.

Robbie Arnott was born in Launceston in 1989. His writing has appeared in Island, the Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings and the 2017 anthology Seven Stories. He won the 2015 Tasmanian Young Writers’ Fellowship and the 2014 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. Robbie lives in Hobart and is an advertising copywriter.

My Review: I'm sure anyone reading my reviews knows of The Guardian's marvelous ten-year-old "Not-the-Booker" crowd-sourced literary prize. I learned of Flames's existence from the ginormous user-generated longlist for this year's jousting match. It looked intriguing, but the contest review sold me, being by Guardian reading-group, literary-link curator Sam Jordison...who also happens to be the co-director of Galley Beggar Press, the 2019 Booker Prize-unwinner Ducks, Newburyport's original publisher. So he's got strong literary chi. I trusted him; I took a leap of faith; I was amply rewarded.

This lovely debut novel from a small-yet-mighty Australian publishing house was a delight to me from the moment I met Karl and his seal. Karl fishes off the northern coast of Tasmania, that deep-southern island state of Australia, the last significant spot of land between Antarctica and the world. His seal, like Lyra's daemon in His Dark Materials, is connected to Karl's very essence and forms a large part of Karl's self—both image and awareness. Their "Oneblood tuna" prey, the giant and preternaturally perfect piscine predators found only in the Bass Strait (this is never stated but is implicit in the constant Japanese tuna-buyers' presence), bring in huge amounts of money from sushi-mad Japanese consumers through their local Tasmanian agents. Karl supports his family, his seal included, on the proceeds of their hunts. His bond with his seal is, however, the source of his undoing. His seal, being but a seal, is not immortal and falls to a hungry orca before Karl's appalled and helpless eyes and ears:

Karl tried to forget that clicking sound. But it was lodged in a hole between his ears, a backdrop to his days that he feared and hated but could not escape. He was reminded of it constantly: when a light switch was flicked, when Louise clicked her fingers, when his leaping daughters clicked their heels, when Sharon at the fish-and-chip shop clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she waited for the oil in the deep fryer to heat up.

There is no magical cure here. Not even for the cruel soulkiller PTSD.

Already, in the first twenty-five pages of the book, the magic of Tasmania's lands and waters bears the reader's weight. "How does a fisherman become the partner of his competitor the seal?" wonders the Western materialist tapping the touchscreen to deliver the next jolt of story-junk to his addict's brain. In these first pages, we're tossed into a magical world where dying mothers (if they're McAllisters) are cremated, return to life as themselves melded with ferny forest glens before recombusting, which thereafter somehow gives the grieving son the clarity to think, "Everyone dies, even when they’re reincarnated;" where the son, who is also a brother, encounters the maimed soul of Karl for a prelude to one of the novel's truly bizarre, and bizarrely perfect, themes, death as an almost-silent character in the weird, winding path the Tasmanian humans tread:

Levi. And then, as if his surname was an afterthought: McAllister. He...ran his hand through his hair. Everything’s fine.
Righto. The name bumped around between Karl’s ears where the clicks usually lived. I’m sorry.

(Be aware that this story is dialogue-light, and such dialogue as there is is italicized as well as unattributed; this could present a problem for some traditionally inclined readers.) This is a crucial moment, but how is the reader to know it? Trusting the newb of an author to put this scene, with its awkward Manly Emotions Inadequately Expressed, in this precise place at this exact juncture is a big ask. I sat a moment after reading this, aware that the expression of sympathy in "I'm sorry" wasn't connected to anything in Levi's head, and the idea of a McAllister wasn't connected to anything in Karl's head (yet); and yet this is a deep and important scene in the book, said my spidey senses. What, why, how?

I love that. Author Arnott didn't tell me! No rookie mistake of hand-holding me through the significance of Levi's peculiar purpose...gathering driftwood for a coffin, a wooden receptacle for much of the meaning in this book...and Karl's peculiar and solitary presence on this beach at this moment. I am left with the deeply experienced reader's tingle in the presence of Momentousness; I am left with a king-sized curiosity bump itching like mad; but I am left and the story moves on.

Levi wants something. (More than the proverbial glass of water, for sure.) He can't really be anything other than an authorial self-portrait because no one else would receive an assessment as cruel as, "Tweaky voice, even though his words were smooth. Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked," unless it was a self-assessment. He wants to control a world he can not comprehend. Levi wants to make the world behave, be orderly, not abandon him as he feels his father did, as he now feels his recombusted mother did; as his sister, whose death will result in her resurrection and recombustion because she's a McAllister woman, has when she discovered Levi was making her a coffin. He loves them all; they all leave him; where's the love in that?

Levi is reminding himself of his resolve: to show Charlotte that she wasn’t condemned to rise again, changed and ghastly, after she died. That her life needn’t end twice. That she needn’t suffer the same fate as their mother. That he had sourced this calming coffin for her and her alone; that in the face of their sorrow he had gone to great lengths to have it built; that he couldn’t go another day knowing she was in such pain; that he cared for her this much; that he loved her more than he could ever show with words; that the coffin represented all this.
Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words.

Levi is, I fear, the very saddest and least likely to be redeemed of the people in the story. Or so we're led carefully to believe.

Now meet Allen, the wombat tenant-farmer, decades among the wombats protecting and caring for them, that they might be turned into pelts. (This somewhat odd-to-non-Tasmanians idea is more suggested than explained.) Allen is a true lover of the deepest South this southernmost tip of Australia has to offer. His helpless adoration for the land is the occasion of some truly lush description:

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm.... If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. Its undulating moorlands of peat and buttongrass; the glints of white quartzite that blink on the mountain caps; the cold, clean welcome of its unbroken sky; the harsh cliffs and tea-coloured waters; the gathering sense of wild solitude that breathes out of every crack in the land. I cannot go back to the flat brown farms of the Midlands, or the over lush dairy pastures of the northwest.

The source of his reverie is anxiety, however, a deep and well-grounded fear that the farm owner will dispense with him when he finally builds up the nerve to describe to her the horrible fate that's begun to befall the wombats in his decades-long care. He's no longer caring for them alone, though.

Karl's daughter Nicola, training as a veterinarian, has come to the farm for work experience; she has established herself with Allen, a taciturn man, as trustworthy and useful. Now Charlotte McAllister arrives, aflutter with the fear of her brother the coffin-procuring weirdo following and finding her. The women are deeply affected by the mysterious wombat deaths, as one would expect. Allen is affected as well, though with time his need for the women's help and his desire to husband the wombats as a farmer is curdling, changing him into a fearsome figure and an angry old man:

Each morning I march off, gun in hand and knife in belt, as their eyes follow me filled with what looks more and more like fear. It is futile, feminine softness, and nothing more.
***
I watched {the wombats} lumber towards her, four-legged lumps of uselessness made flesh, and realised that I hated them, that I must always have hated them, that I had been lying to myself for all the long years I have been trapped in this barren southern hell.

Action is required; the women take it. Events swirl out of control, Allen transmogrifies into an avatar of rage and hatred unique to this one place in the world. His final acts of fury and aggression cause a shocking change to come over Charlotte: She finds in herself her mother's fierce power to burn. Only she finds it before she dies, and she finds it as a defensive weapon against old Allen.

This is the beginning of the most intense, most magical passage in the novel: The search of Charlotte for control over her power to burn. Nicola is the only person who can quench Charlotte's fire. She gentles the rage and softens the heat in her friend (not feeling it as unusual that she has this heat...maybe because of her own father Karl's seal-mate?), and takes Charlotte to a place where she cannot cause accidental damage to the world around her. She drives them to the Northern mountains, a beautiful snowy stony world where her father's Japanese tuna-buying friend has a stone-built home. Perfect! It's too cold for vacationing friends to want to be there; Australian snow-tourists aren't going to know where it is. Of course they have all the comforts...the flammable comforts...of home:

Nicola turned back to Charlotte, looking harder through the darkness, and saw a thin blue trail worming out of her ear. It had reached the cushion beside her head—a wispy, plasticky stream of it, rising up into the cabin. As Nicola scrambled towards Charlotte the smoking patch of cushion erupted into a small blue flame. With one hand she smacked it out, and with the other she rested a palm on Charlotte’s hot cheek.
Through her palm she again felt the pulse of flame from within Charlotte’s body. Again she felt it flicker out. She felt the burn in her stomach, hot and red, and knew she’d doused the fire. Again she didn’t want to let go.

Charlotte learns slowly to control the flames of her combustive power. Nicola continues to gentle her rage and bank her fires; they become (inevitably) lovers. And it is at this point that the novel shows how much it is a first novel, one by a man.

Women connected in intimacy must, of course, be sexually involved. If/then, right? No. Not that cut-and-dried, but that is where men go with it. To be fair, that's where men go with it among their own kind as well. I can think of few truly intimate friendships between men in male-authored stories. More often than not they are hidden rivalries or become sexual relationships. Still, it's not as though the issue is handled pruriently. We're not treated to much more than a kiss and some hand-holdings between the ladies.

Also not very deft is the handling of the female private detective whose presence in the narrative is to give us a reason to go on the road while she tries to find Charlotte. She's the device used to deal with an unwoven plot thread about another of Tasmania's many nature gods. A human causes the death of the animal-formed Esk God in his own river. That certainly can't go unanswered. The tough-as-nails prick-teasing ball-buster P.I. stereotype is launched to give these two strands a fast stitch. Her own story of having a strong physical sixth sense is shorted, as it must be unless the book is to be as long as the Bible. Suffice to say she serves her dual purpose, then goes quietly away. In fact, she was underused. Her role, larger and less broad-stroked, could've bridged the super- and the natural worlds. Missed opportunity, that.

It is also at this point in the narrative, the point where Charlotte and Nicola are together and dealing with the weirdness of Tasmania's hyperaware supernatural world, when we discover Charlotte's ancestral connection to fire. I won't spoil it. It's one of the lyrical joys of the book. At last we bring all the narrative strands together. Charlotte and Levi each learn how to speak their truths to each other; Nicola learns that her life's bonds are strong enough to bear the weight of multitudes; Levi, in a unexpected and amazing volte-face, learns his rudderless life's purpose. And it is Karl, at Nicola's behest, who weaves this into another strand between Charlotte's McAllister firey world and Nicola's seas and snows. It is exactly right.

The few issues above set aside, I'm left delighting in the sheer beauty of the language and the vigorous imagination that gave the magic of Tasmania a voice at last. This is what makes Flames a full five-star read. Earlier I mentioned the moment I knew when the threads of these disparate stories began to merge, that initial knowledge of Momentous Doings taking place. The full fruition of that sense came when the supernatural and natural worlds collided with all the force and all the passion of the stories told up to now; the resolution was revealed, the purpose of these journeys was enunciated:

A cloud’s sorrow: you cannot imagine it. But you can feel it, whenever a storm hits the world with uncommon force. When mountains crack and forests flood. When rivers surge and oceans bloat. When there is no true shelter left in the world. For the hardest storms are made of sorrow.

Sadness and sorrow powered the trip. The destination, left a bit in shadow, is as simple and as difficult as:

It had something to do with attraction...and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose.