Set in a vividly captured Tasmania, Arnott’s third book describes one man’s life with a sense of beauty, serious and quiet
. 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.
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”.
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 , 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.
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