The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
In the future depicted in The Swan Book, Aboriginal people continue to live in the north under the Intervention, in a climate that has undergone significant alteration. The story follows the life of Oblivia, a mute teenager who was the victim of gang rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flood-prone and lawless southern city.
The Swan Book possesses all the elements that helped Carpentaria, Wright’s last book, become a best-seller and winner of awards. Her writing has a wild energy and sense of humour that finds hope in even the most hopeless circumstances. Oblivia Ethylene is in the company of amazing characters like Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Big Red and the Mechanic, a talking monkey named Rigoletto, three doctoral-level genies, and through a remarkable combination of storytelling elements from myth, legend, and fairy tale
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
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In a world fundamentally transformed by climate change, and after an Army Intervention, Aboriginals are living in a gated camp next to a foul swamp filled with the trash of war, this novel is set in the future in Australia, around the time of the third century. It chronicles the life of Oblivia Ethylene, a young muffled woman. Oblivia, who was the victim of gang rape, resides on a hulk in a marsh with thousands of black swans and rotting boats. Oblivia is taken from this uprooted tribe and forced to live in a tower in a lawless, inundated southern city where she will marry Warren Finch, who will soon become Australia’s first Aboriginal president.
Both the world of The Swan Book, which is both rich and beautiful and terrible and terribly troubled, and the language, which is vivid and visceral and repeated in ways that can seem almost incantatory, exist in an extremely heightened form of reality. The Swan Book gives you an understanding of the various ways that time inhabits a place for Aboriginal people, showing how the distant past is still alive and present. The Swan Book has every quality that made Wright’s final book, Carpentaria, a best-seller and an award-winner. Even in the most hopeless situations, she finds humour and crazy energy in her work.
The Swan Book by indigenous author Alexis Wright makes a potent statement on the State’s rejection of black self-determination. Alexis Wright’s prior look into Aboriginal Australia was set in a fictional Queensland hamlet aptly dubbed Desperance.
Oblivia Ethylene is the main character, who is on a “mission to recover sovereignty over my own head” but is unable to express it. She resides on a contaminated lake that the Army controls and that is littered with old military equipment and ships. Her country of origin is now used by the Defense Force for clandestine bombing and training runs.
