“A magic donkey could rip your heart out and make you go wild, if it knew you had an overwhelming desire to own it, and knew that you would do anything to capture its power.”
“She is the prisoner of the ghosts and trapped inside her house.”
“… of course he knows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is not dead, and could never die – just sometimes, seen differently, as though having sprouted from the ground, grown out of a multi-consciousness, wearing multiple ancestries with the same religiousness of country, atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna, deep inside, where the law of silence in the bush reigned, or sometimes, storms rose with hazes of butterflies.”
While researching possible selections for the 2024 Booker Prize, I routinely heard buzz about Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing 2023). (I actually don’t think it was eligible for the prize this year.) While the political allegory of a tome did not make the cut for the Booker, it has been awarded numerous other awards (Praiseworthy is apparently quite praiseworthy), and I decided to add it to my Booker stack anyway. Over 600 pages later, I’m not sure if I should have.
Praiseworthy is a fictional town in north Australia, and it’s a bit of an ecological nightmare and home to the ancestors. The novel, a lyrical bit of political allegory, bleeds and screams against oppression, greed, and assimilation. In many ways, the novel reminds me of a former Booker longlist selection, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory. Incidentally, the word “glory” makes repeated appearances in both novels. Unlike Glory, I found this novel far too long and honestly a bit dull – at least for the first quarter. It does pick up about halfway through.
There are some fantastic parts to this novel and those parts are stunningly done. Very long story short, a haze has settled over Praiseworthy, and the government will not help. Cause Man Steel is trying to find a magical donkey to launch a donkey transport business and save everyone from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, tries to escape his single-minded madness by studying butterflies and moths. (She is frequently called moth-er, which I LOVE.) His eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, is seen as a great hope, but he is trying to kill himself. Cause Man’s youngest son, Tommyhawk, hates his parents and his brother and wants to be adopted by the government and become white. The focus of the second half is Tommyhawk reporting his brother for pedophilia (Ab. Sov. has an arranged betrothed who is still technically a minor) and the punishment he receives at the hands of the police, followed by him walking out into the sea never to be seen from in Praiseworthy again.
The reappearing use of butterflies and moths is my favorite aspect of the novel. From the brown butterfly then send south to request governmental aid (it comes back singed) to the police assuming “butterflies” means something to do with drugs, to the butterflies falling dead from the sky and landing on the back of puppy dogs, to the roar of the butterflies demanding they want Aboriginal Sovereignty back – it’s lovely.
As a whole, the book is far from my favorite, but I can see why it’s gotten the attention it has.
Read this book. But, word of caution, there’s a lot of words to weed out to get to the meat, which is quite tasty.
A Girl Named Tommi 