- All Our Shimmering Skies, by Trent Dalton. HarperCollins. $32.99.
All Our Shimmering Skies is another bravura effort from Trent Dalton, whose first novel Boy Swallows Universe delighted in 2018, winning several book industry awards.
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Fans of Dalton's extravagant language and storytelling will find much to like in this second book.
Others will find some of the criticism for the earlier book applies here, too - dealing in stereotypes, and in need of a good edit.
The novel follows Molly, the gravedigger's daughter who, in the first chapter, endures her mother's untimely exit.
This hardens her heart against the Dickensian ill-treatment meted out by her father and uncle, and the collision with history brought about by the Second World War bombing of her home town, Darwin, in "the war that fell from the sky".
Many will see this literary meandering through the Territory as rich pickings for an Australian writer with an ambition to make a mark.
All Our Shimmering Skies seems to do for the Territory what Oscar and Lucinda did for New South Wales.
At times, Dalton's prose invokes Peter Carey - poetic, mythic, magical realist.
At other times, it seems overdone and even clichéd - can we really accept the gravedigger's wife would have been reading Shakespeare and Dickinson to her daughter?
The gravedigger girl, her family curse, the black dirt and purple violence all swirl through an overdrawn tale that is extravagant, vivid with image, almost swooning and sometimes febrile - carried away by its own dextrous prose.
Of course being able to write like this is a gift and many people will love Dalton for it.
I found it came to seem strangely derivative, as though writing about the past must itself be old-fashioned.
I kept seeing the movie playing behind the lines; all exterior, little real emotion, all for effect.
Making use of literary tropes that come to mind in a tale of the territory from that time: a deprived childhood, Blackfella country, the snake killed with a spade, the whore with porcelain skin, even the Japanese knife maker.
All of these are compelling in the telling, but remain shallow in a book that is somehow studied.
That said, it's a prodigious piece of imagining, and no doubt All Our Shimmering Skies is lining up another literary award.
And it comes out hard on the heels of the announcement that Boy Swallows Universe is to be produced for television.
All Our Shimmering Skies likely awaits the same fate ... watch this space.
- Robyn Ferrell is adjunct professor in the Centre for Law, Art and Humanities at the ANU.
