Limberlost

 

Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott's third novel, Limberlost, has been much shortlisted and won The Age Fiction Book of the Year. This is a small, quiet novel, and yet it's also huge. Closely following the events of one wartime summer, young Ned traps rabbits, saves up for a boat, misses his two brothers, away at war, cares for an injured wild quoll. But while the plot is almost negligible, the novel wrestles with big questions of masculinity, death, guilt and love, responsibility and freedom. We flash back and forward in time, to understand the origins and consequences of the choices Ned makes in this pivotal summer and end up seeing a whole life in the shape of this one season.

Arnott's prose is exquisite. He packs a heft of subtle beauty into each gorgeous paragraph; Limberlost is worth reading for the descriptions alone. While some of the characters may be less than satisfyingly fleshed out, the world of the senses, the river and the bush and the orchard, are richly realised. Arnott withholds the name of Ned's wife until a good way into the novel, but it wasn't hard to guess her identity, and this trick did pull me out of the story.

Now I'll have to check out Arnott's previous, equally lauded, novels. He's still a relatively young writer, and I'm intrigued to find out what he does next.