From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed

Among many other prizes for her stunningly original work, Alexis Wright has won Australia’s greatest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, for a novel of the highest literary merit representing Australian life. It is ironic, but sadly apt, that her epic Praiseworthy should be published in the year that Australians, offered a chance to give greater political rights to their indigenous peoples, have voted not to.

Wright is an Aboriginal activist as well as a writer. Praiseworthy, which has already won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, is an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory, and not an easy read. It does not care to be. Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged – James Joyce crossed with Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin and Arundhati Roy.

Everything blends into everything else: realism and magic realism, dream and reality, donkeys and butterflies, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz. There are few paragraphs, but every sentence flashes and disturbs, every chapter begins by exhorting an oracle to speak up, and behind all the linguistic power you feel the presence of a dispossessed land, despoiled by two centuries of extractive industries after millennia of careful Aboriginal stewardship, now burning.

The story focuses on the Steels, who live on the outskirts of a small town in the Northern Territory called Praiseworthy at the time of the Howard ‘intervention’, which from 2008 devastated the wellbeing of indigenous Australians. But it also slips through multiple timelines into more recent years of fake news, Trump and climate emergency. Soaring temperatures make life unbearable. Then a dust haze settles over Praiseworthy, presaging ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors.