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The Voices by Susan Elderkin

Stevie Davies is spellbound by a novel that conjures up the phantoms that haunt modern Australia

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31 May 2003 - Querulous, quarrelsome, we loll up here in our hammocks above the red desert landscape. (I expect you wonder who we are: well, as readers of The Voices, you'll find out if you keep reading, and this book is so beguilingly readable that we're sure you will). But what's she up to now, the spirit child? Someone tell her it's too late. Too late for all of us. (You've never read an apocalypse as poignantly comic as this, we guarantee it. You might get a bit confused at times. Well, we're confused ourselves and, as for that lippy wind that keels around crooning and disturbing everything, if anyone finds out what's in his noddle, let us know).

You give up? OK, we're the Aboriginal ancestral spirits of Australia, who link the human and universal. Easy, isn't it, when you've got the clue? This solution, by the way, is given on p238, so you could look it up first if in doubt. But just clock that loopy spirit child: she won't improve communications by importing a phone and a television into the Outback as hearing and seeing aids to our scrying. No, time's up. No one believes in us any more. See if we care. We smoke pot, languidly dispute with the wind and fry and dry in this intolerable heat.

Susan Elderkin's The Voices is a tour de force about ... well, difficult to say at first, but at least we can agree that it's about Billy. A white boy not at home in his home. Or his skin. Starved of tenderness and touch, Billy is the chosen one of a dead black girl, who "sings him up" to become a dreamer and a roamer, entering into the ancient songlines. His sexual wound, congress with the dead, his trespass against nature in killing a kangaroo, followed by despair, flight, a stint as a miner, and a punishment of mutilation, are epic and mythic elements skilfully camouflaged by the novel's comedic manner and tangy idiom.

But, come to think of it, the book isn't really about Billy. Let's say it's about a rock. A red, sacred rock upon which (in an unforgettable scene), Billy keeps dawn-watch on a mob of kangaroos "draped round the furniture of the trees and rocks like a family in their living room" until, with the rising sun, their pelts are blooded in "a wash of stunning, coppery red". Billy, "stained red" too, seeks to belong with the roos in the "chain" of lifeforms that links sun, rocks, roos, boys.

So this is a fiction about Australia: modern Australia crowded with phantoms. Ghosts of the slaughtered or marginalised indigenes; voices of a culture and religion all but vanished, though milked for tourist lucre. Almost an allegory, then, seen from this light. Coldiver seeks to turn the sacred rock into a money-making tourist attraction. Not very successfully as it turns out, for, in this tale of cautionary transgressions, the singing rock swallows English visiting lasses alive - and a black gets blamed. In the allegory, the spirit child who sexually mutilates Billy is a remnant of the stolen Aborigine children: "We will civilise your child."

Susan Elderkin's characteristically dazzling techniques are on display in all their virtuosity and freakish inventiveness. Voice and perspective rove indeterminately from the very believable, rough-spoken and tenderly observed Outback community to the spirit world. Descriptions of place are animistic, and the earth a living being. A young ghost has rip-roaring vitality, linking the living and dead, blacks and whites, to the earth to which all belong: "out of the rock appears a silhouetted elbow, a triangle of sky wedged in it".

A compelling sense of earth's mystery and the terror of its secrets is evoked by the novel's power to spellbind (or bamboozle) the reader, in this heart-rending and funny dance of death - and new life. Elderkin's novel is a page-turner partly because we are never sure where we are, but we want to know, or what she is going to do next. For sheer narrative invention and wanton brio, she is without an equal.

Stevie Davies's latest novel is 'The Element of Water'

Source:The Independent

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