To The Islands - Randolph Stow

Title: To The Islands       

Author: Randolph Stow

Publisher: Text Classics 

Publish date: 1958 (Original), Revised edition Angus and Robertson Sydney 1981, Text Classics 2015

ISBN: 9781925240290

'He fed her until she was satisfied, and then she reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand, and leaned over and rested her forehead there. In that way they sat for what seemed like a long time in that timeless place, naked brown woman by naked white man, and he stroked the loose skin on her back with tenderness, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep.'

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This novel won the Miles Franklin Literary Award when it was first published in 1958. It was written after Stow worked for a few months as a ration storeman at the Anglican-run Forrest River Mission in far north Western Australia, and draws heavily on the experience. This edition was re-edited by Stow in 1981, with some portions of the original deleted (according to his own introduction to this edition). I have to say, it doesn’t strike one as a novel written by a 22-year-old. Not this life-time round, for sure.

The story revolves around an Anglican minister reconciling his oncoming death with his faith, his self-doubts, and his environment. The Australian Outback provides a Shakespearean exile-setting of liminal harshness, peopled by the half-familiar, half-inscrutable Aboriginals.

The novel is extraordinary. One level of intrigue is that it tells of a case of extreme indigestion of The Wasteland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Medieval Mystery plays, Shakespeare (Lear in particular, self-confessedly), Baudelaire, Cervantes, Walt Whitman, the Bible, and Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives among others. Gobbets and echoes from Western literature drop into the dust of the Outback, as incongruous and fascinating as the main character that stumbles through the narrative.

Another level is the sentence structure, and the narrative structure that inversely echoes it. On the sentence level, the initial third or so of the book is overtly fluid in construct, with multiple and inverted clauses, subjects far from their objects, and pronouns frequently ambiguously placed. There is little demarcation between scenes. Time is not linear, nor is much attempt made to clarify where or how the characters are moving or what they are doing. So we’ll suddenly hear of a protagonist stop leaning against a tree, when last time we 'saw' then there were inside a building. Even the names seem to be deliberately confusing, with most of the characters being variously referred to either by their first names, surnames, or their personal pronoun being misplaced altogether so that numerous re-reads are needed to guess who is doing what. The effect is a gauzy haze of impressionist prose with pinpoint ‘plums’ of clarity. As the novel progresses this pattern morphs, via poetic jumps and rhythm, into a much more consistently direct diction. It abandons the passive voice and looking-glass grammar. Utterly perversely, the more the diction straightens up, the more the narrative disintegrates into stanzas of what might be termed associative meditation. Clarity is insanity, and confusion is the real world.

A third level of uniqueness is the yearning portrayal of the many dissonances between the white settlers and native Australians. The gulf between them is tectonic, pushing up strange behaviours where they are least expected. It isolates not only each individual character with a cocoon of silence, but the reader as well, bouncing one about in a muffled cotton-ball through a suspicious and hostile dreamscape. But within the haze of the novel’s Gethsemane-like wanderings, the communication gap is sometimes a vast canyon, and then suddenly barely a trickle of water on a flat plane. Both the unbridgeable weight of  silence and the fervent desire for it to be gone are, I think, uniquely Australian, and something echoed repeatedly in the country’s literature, but rarely so accurately given emotional coordinates.

In short, the novel is indeed more than deserving of the accolades it has won and its status as a classic piece. Don’t pick it up if you want an easy read. It is difficult, and I haven’t even started to scratch the surface. Five moose-hoofs up out of five, with both ears up as well for emphasis.