Weird and Wondrous

Kind of a low-key day. I felt enjoyably productive yesterday & kind of anticipated more of the same today, but instead I basically just loafed around.

Anyway, in honor of Easter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to blog about two recent reads that really embodied a "sense of wonder," Flames and The Rain Heron by Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott. Both are pretty unique: language on the literary side; I suppose I'd label them "magic realism" if I really had to pick a label. Both set in Tasmania (or some version of it), both paying close attention to nature and to human nature.

Flames begins:

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. She was definitely our mother--but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all. Since her dispersal among the fronds of Notley, she had changed. Now her skin was carpeted by spongy, verdant moss and thin tendrils of common filmy fern. Six large fronds of tree fern had sprouted from her back and extended past her waist in a layered peacock tail of vegetation. And her hair had been replaced by cascading fronds of lawn-colored maidenhair--perhaps the most delicate fern of all.

This kind of thing wasn't uncommon in our family.

It does not get less strange from there. The next chapter powerfully tells the story of a hunter, a man who bonds to and swims with a seal to hunt tuna. While the novel ultimately centers around the brother and sister children of the fern woman, each chapter is told from a different point of view, ranging from a hard-boiled woman detective to a river god in the form of a rakali water-rat, as the story itself ranges across Tasmania before returning to Notley Fern Gorge.    

Flames seems timeless in some ways but is set in the present day. The Rain Heron is set in a post-apocalyptic near future (although perhaps "apocalypse" is a bit strong; life goes on, in its way, perhaps "post-coup"). A troop of soldiers is sent to a rural mountain-top, to hunt down a woman who is said to know the location of the mythic bird. If The Rain Heron or the myth/folktale at its heart has a moral, it's not a clear or simple one. It is, in part, a story about choosing violence and choosing nonviolence.