Some small, personal mythologies are inevitable: stories that get told and retold – to others, to ourselves. For Ned, the main character in Tasmanian Robbie Arnott’s third novel, these coalesce around a single teenage summer. His brothers – “soundless, inscrutable” Bill; charming, reckless Toby – are away at war. His father and sister, Maggie, are stoic but distant, racked by unspoken dread. All three get on with the business of the family orchard in the island’s north (Limberlost, named for the natural haven in Ned’s dead mother’s favourite book). Ned is otherwise left largely to his own devices. Specifically, hunting rabbits to sell for pelts, to buy a boat. Or, not so much a boat as “what he’d feel in the grip of its planks”: a soft freedom, a means to enact competence, physically, in the world.
Limberlost at first seems like a known quantity: quiet man comes of age, wrestles with self and duty, both soothed and troubled by nature. Hardly threadbare territory, but nor is it new. This is also by far Arnott’s most realist outing, less formally interesting than Flames; less conceptually epic than The Rain Heron. But his exploration of mid-century Anglo masculinity – inarticulate fathers, loggers “mirror[ing] the violence they’d wreaked on the [trees] … in the way they treated their own bodies” – dovetails with subtler matter. Ned longs “for his adult self to be more resolved” and to “not crash through the world, but slide into it”, private wishes which stem from something more nuanced than patriarchal pressure. This book, in which Arnott’s style has tempered into something rich and singing, flashes with the sensation of consciousness. Ned flays himself over spilled confidences, yearns to get it right – writhing under expectations that no one, perhaps, has placed on him. In his third-person portrait of Ned’s struggle “to convert … experience into meaningful language”, to conserve an autonomy both internal and intangible, Arnott touches the haze of being a person (duty, stress, panic, terror, pleasure), the shifting sting of being alive.
The novel cuts decades forward, as the currents of Ned’s life “[palm] his shoulder, [pull] his wrist”, and slips back, repeatedly, to one childhood night: taken to the river mouth by his father to see a whale up close – “a deep pull of terror, of strangeness and starlight”. The boat he is restoring is a way to revisit – literally – this formative memory; to “stay at that field of water until all the things he could not handle were rinsed out of him”. Arnott’s writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental, capturing its out-of-kilter ferocity: a place of beauty but not peace (a “clear thematic preoccupation” observed by critic James Ley in Arnott’s first two novels) – of “the potential for carnage”, violence “both vague and choreographed”. When Ned accidentally traps a quoll, he reels at its fury and panic, “its mouth erupting with hissing screams”. But he also notices “the spots on its pelt [shining] against the wood like a patterned moth, a living quilt”; “the soft art with which it moved”.
Limberlost is tied to the Tasmanian landscape, Letteremairrener, Pairelehoinner and Panninher country. Arnott captures sound, temperature and smell with honey clarity. We take in Ned’s heightened awareness of the wattle’s “flowering gold”, eucalypts and paperbarks “leak[ing] their summer oils, shimmering the air, thickening the light”, “lonesome shoulders of wind-combed dune grass” – and later, “the absence of certain forests that had once crawled over the low mountains”. He listens to stories from the “old people” in the valleys where he lives; feels, in light of their ancient knowledge and skill, “the looseness of his connection to the place … how tenuous his grip on the world was”.
But his relationship to their colonial dispossession is indirect. At the end of the book, he is pushed to confront this. It’s a challenge – a reminder that awareness alone is meaningless, a way to “[treat] it all as history … [do] nothing about it”. But while the book describes this challenge (Ley, in 2020, described Arnott as “descriptive not discursive”), it does not take it up. This moment falls too close to a breathtakingly moving final scene, where the centre of narrative gravity ultimately rests.
The Richard Flanagan comparison presents itself (men, the war, Tasmania, trees) – but where one critic found The Narrow Road to the Deep North “marred by its determination to demonstrate high seriousness”, the seriousness of Limberlost is where it is most sweet. Arnott, I think, isn’t sentimental. Ned’s failures and errors aren’t presented as moments of transformation or growth. They are allowed simply to stand, as part of the whole.
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott is out now in Australia (Text Publishing, $32.99)
