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Kevin Rabalais

Autor von Novel Voices

3 Werke 69 Mitglieder 1 Rezension

Werke von Kevin Rabalais

Novel Voices (2003) — Herausgeber — 55 Exemplare
The Landscape of Desire (2008) 12 Exemplare

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The history of Australia’s ill-fated exploration parties makes for great reading: whether the author reconstructs the historical record into narrative or recreates it as fiction, these stories can’t help but convey the romance of exploring into the unknown; the beauty and the terror of the remote Australian landscape; the hubris of the explorers and their backers who knew nothing of the network of indigenous Songlines which already mapped the continent; and the poignant tragedy of a lonely death witnessed only by the humiliation of failure and frustrated ambition. Landscape of Desire now joins my favourites of these stories: Patrick White’s magnificent Voss which is a fictionalisation of Leichhardt’s doomed venture into the Great Sandy Desert (see my review) and Sarah Murgatroyd’s brilliant history The Dig Tree which reconstructs Burke and Wills’ disastrous expedition to cross the continent which ended in tragedy at Cooper’s Creek.

Landscape of Desire is a masterly first novel fictionalising this same story. Ambitious in scope and structure, the book assumes some knowledge of the expedition and its protagonists, introducing multiple narratives that shape events before, during and after the loss of the party, and fracturing the chronology to sustain interest in a story already very well-known.

Rabalais has resisted the temptations of first person narrative, but we hear the perspectives of Burke, the moody and eccentric police inspector-turned-leader of the expedition; and also the stoic surveyor Wills who turns out to have more in common with Burke than either of them knew. There is the narrative of the sole survivor John King and his sojourn among the Aborigines who saved his life; of William Brahe, haunted by the bad timing of his departure from Cooper’s Creek; and Alfred Howitt, sent by the exploration committee to investigate the disappearance but who found only King still alive. And – missing from the heroic version of this doomed expedition that my generation learned at school – there is also the love interest: the young actress Julia Matthews whose mother hopes for more than a policeman as a husband for Julia and who, in this novel, is thus the catalyst for Burke’s efforts to impress her with his heroic venture. (Unless there is more to the historical record than I know, this is one of a number of imagined aspects of the novel.)

By and large the technique is successful, though Julia’s voice is not as convincing as the others. She does not, of course, have as significant or as dramatic a part to play. Hers is a bit part, in the vast amphitheatre of this novel. But the other characters are very compelling – they all have so much invested in their enterprise; ambitions offset by the simple kindness and generosity of the indigenous woman Karuwa at home in a landscape that terrifies them all.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2014/04/10/landscape-of-desire-by-kevin-rabalais/
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anzlitlovers | Aug 15, 2016 |

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Werke
3
Mitglieder
69
Beliebtheit
#250,752
Bewertung
½ 3.7
Rezensionen
1
ISBNs
7

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