Book review: Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

In Arnott’s world, the rudder of Ned’s boat has to “talk” to the sail, or at least “listen” to it. So, although Ned wouldn’t use such word himself, we believe that he sees a trader as made of “lint, capillaries and vapour”, that he hears “the bush’s orchestra of terror”.

Through this language, Arnott shows us Tasmanian trees that a quoll can survive in, the watery home of leatherjackets and abalone. His England is a “fairytale” place of “a deep, storybook green” that Ned visits to investigate a new pesticide. Because this is a fairytale world, we want to tell Ned not to trust what he’s given there, or at least to pay attention to warnings. With the novel named in honour of another environment-minded writer, it’s no real surprise that the deadliest thing in the novel is far smaller than a whale.

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This is a novel about the deepest of emotions, about love, the fear of loss, and about joy. The scent of his boat’s timber puts Ned “under a spell he … never truly recovered from, like a wish come true”. On Ned’s honeymoon, the majestic river “runs and breaks”, falling “to splash the boots of the gazing newlyweds”. In Ned’s happiness, nature exists to serve his gaze, just as his dream wasn’t so much to own a boat as to have his brothers see him out on it.

Whether or not Ned returns to the place where he saw the whale, he needs to realise he’s not simply Bill and Toby’s “warless little brother”. Arnott shows that the fantastic can be an element we create in our own lives, sometimes to bear the otherwise unbearable. We are with Ned as he learns that life’s real magic is in the love he finds within his family.

Any readers unresponsive to the magical realism of Arnott’s previous novels should find something to appreciate here, and people who already value his writing will have the opportunity to see him working his lyrical magic in a more familiar but equally beguiling world.

Kimberley Starr’s most recent novel, Torched, is published by Pantera Press.

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