Read: Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster
It is bizarre and incredibly confusing at the start. The moment I opened the book I felt like I had jumped in only to find myself floundering in the open sea. Hospital explains in far more beautiful language:
“I want you to understand why the telling is complicated; why the facts may seem to float loose in a sequence of their own devising, much as a bunch of helium-filled balloons, their strings all released from the same hand at the same moment in time, and from a point, let us say, one mile upwind from you, will certainly not reach you as a cluster. Some will drift so high in upper thermal currents that you will be unable to see them, though they will nevertheless pass by. Some may brush your hand, some will veer north or south and never reach you at all. Some will spin in contrary winds and come back to you, days later, from further on.”
Outer Maroo is a rather hateful little place that doesn’t like strangers, but strangers do arrive and they mysteriously disappear. The story of Outer Maroo is told in reverse. It begins and then goes back two years.
The man named Oyster is a charismatic cult leader who has seduced the young and the lost to work for him mining opals. We don’t actually meet Oyster until much later in the book, but his presence is continually felt in the town, and especially by 16-year-old Mercy, who feels so much and is struggling to find herself. I can’t help but like Mercy, young as she is, for she is one who finds joy in reading and for whom “the exact word can slightly and momentarily ease her anxiety”.
That’s a horrible summary of the book’s premise I know, but I really don’t want to throw up any spoilers in your face here. Just know that it’s quite a remarkable book, and one that stays with you weeks after reading it. I hate to work that often-used word but it is indeed, compelling. The story is intriguing, that reverse order ends up working perfectly fine and Hospital’s prose just leaves me wanting more. Here she writes about those funny creatures, the emus:
“Emus, a pair of them, pick their awkwardly delicate way out of the scrub, beaking at insects, necking the low trees, heads moving in concert with such weird dreamy grace that they seem to be engaged in a little pas de deux all on their own: two balled-up furry little bird skull ballet dancers, nothing but eye, gliding atop their long-legged necks.”
Book provided by – my library
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