Trent Dalton’s wartime epic novel is a triumph of storytelling
All Our Shimmering Skies is a vision of the Top End so thrilling and vividly represented that it should come with a warning.
Covid has been with us long enough now that some things may be said with certainty. In the realm of culture, for example, books have risen to the moment. No longer do they gather dust on bedside tables or prop up laptops for Netflix.
In the relative absence of the performing arts, at a moment when the spigot of new productions for screen has dried to a trickle, words on paper have recalled us to their old efficacy: as entertainments, as theatres of ethical dilemma, as documents of beauty, wit or imagination.
Fiction, in particular, has felt like a salve: a distraction from and consolation for concerns we forgot we possessed until those empty lockdown hours yawned to remind us. And during the first moment in decades when the cosmopolitan diversions of abroad are physically unavailable to Australians, attention has necessarily returned to the ground beneath our feet, to stories of the island continent we inhabit.
All Our Shimmering Skies, Trent Dalton’s follow-up to his preposterously successful and deservedly beloved debut Boy Swallows Universe, enters this curious moment like an Olympic diver performing a reverse somersault in pike position from 10m up. The iron law of second novel difficulty demands ambition be expanded in direct proportion to the success of the first. The happy news is that the author’s execution is once again faultless.
The result - a widescreen historical epic of Australia’s Top End, set during the Japanese bombings of Darwin during World War II and told in a raw, lyrical and hauntingly intimate key - meets our fresh hunger for old school narrative with a tale that is 100 per cent magic pudding.
At first glance, though, the new novel seems little like its predecessor. Boy Swallows Universe had at its centre a mother trapped and passive in the face of awful circumstance. It was boys and men who had to step up and hold the broken universe of the novel together. Boy, moreover, was a fiction whose energy and fascination emerged, in large part, from how closely its material hewed to the author’s own life experience. Its era of unfolding was in recent memory; its locale, the low, suburban banal.
The new novel turns these dynamics inside out. This time it is a father who fails to front up to challenges thrown up by the world in the process of falling apart. This time it is a mother who is obliged to arm her child - a daughter - for struggles she should not have to face so young. And unless Dalton has a recovered past life as a Darwin gravedigger’s daughter to draw upon, All Our Shimmering Skies is a work of pure imagination, set at an historical remove and in a part of Australia so remote that, to most of us, it may as well be offshore.
All this difference is heightened by the nature of its witnessing intelligence. Readers are solidly embedded from the outset behind the eyes of Molly Hook, just seven years old in a prefatory chapter touching on the death of her mother - the moment when she effectively becomes an orphan - and barely 13 when the narrative proper begins.
Molly is a beguiling amalgam of innocence and experience. Imagine a feral Miranda, grown up on an island of red dust and Milkwood trees, without society or knowledge and only the dead for company. School has been intermittent at best for Molly, but she has in obedience to her mother’s last wish worked through the small library of poetry which was her sole material bequest.
So, while she spends most of her days shovelling graves for her father and uncle, owners of the family-run cemetery on Darwin’s sun-baked outskirts, within Molly is a creature made of Whitman and Emily Dickinson and colonial-era Australian verse: voices of beauty and freedom and ecstatic communion which, given her situation, are somewhat at variance to facts on the ground.
Namely, that her mother is dead and that her father, one Horace Hook, is an ineffectual drunk. Her uncle Aubrey is also a drunk, but he is not ineffectual.
He is a creature of genuine malevolence whom she treats with animal wariness. To both men, Molly is effectively slave labour, if they deign to notice her at all.
The only friends Molly has to array against such domestic awfulness are a handsome young indigenous station rider named Sam Greenway - an American cowboy movie aficionado with whom Molly is half in love - and Uncle Aubrey’s attractive, world-weary and long-suffering girlfriend, Greta Maze. Oh, and a sturdy, snake-killing shovel named Bert.
As was the case with the young cast of Boy Swallows Universe, despite various comic turns there is nothing winsome or cute about Molly Hook. She is a textbook study in early trauma.
A psychoanalyst would say the magical thinking she resorts to, the weird certainty Molly has that her dead mother speaks to her via the blue Darwin sky – that her maternal family have been cursed after her prospector grandfather took gold that did not belong to him and was damned for his theft by an indigenous lawman known as Longcoat Bob - are strategies to circumvent the absence or unresponsiveness of a parent.
But because Dalton is a storyteller, a dramatist rather than a theorist, he indulges her subjective extravagance while granting us just enough external perspective to suggest the adults around her reckon she’s touched.
Still, he gifts Molly with running interior dialogues, outsized imaginings and an unassailable quality of grace. She is superbly stubborn in her refusal to succumb to either adult corruption or despair. She is one of those characters you can’t help but root for, while your more jaded mature awareness knows she is toast.
But the war upsets this expectation. When word comes that women and children are to be evacuated by boat from Darwin, Molly takes her chance and plots an escape.
The Japanese air force intervenes ahead of time, however, and she and Greta are shunted onto a different track, one where a Japanese fighter pilot will become important.
Evading the destruction of the city, they head to Capricornia’s ‘‘deep country’’ in search of Longcoat Bob, hoping the reputed sorcerer will lift his curse before Molly’s already heavy heart turns to stone, the same fate Molly believes was suffered by both grandfather and mother before her.
All Our Shimmering Skies is a novel so replete with plot that spoilers would be an affront to the major pleasures it has to offer. Every reader should enter its pages alone and unarmed. But this much may be said: Dalton’s narrative mode is accelerationist, his manner of description frankly psychedelic.
This is a vision of the Top End so thrilling in unfolding and vividly represented that it should come with a warning to epileptics.
But it is not modern, not really. Dalton is an author of 19th-century expansiveness, one with a sense that intelligence, talent for characterisation and sheer narrative brio can still be the whole cloth of the writer’s ambition, not just leftover scraps left for kids books and genre. Just as we have learned in recent times that technologies are not rendered obsolete but instead situated anew according to the needs of the moment, the novels of Trent Dalton remind us that older traditions of storytelling can survive, even thrive, amid the asperities of contemporary literary form.
Cold hearts may disapprove of the Dickensian swank of All Our Shimmering Skies: its unabashed embrace of brave orphans and wild coincidence and sympathetic magic.
For the rest of us, though, it is storytelling manna, fallen straight from the Territorian skies.
Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.
Which empire introduced coffee to Europe?
What fish is used in Worcestershire sauce? Which two film sequels have starred Robert Carlyle? Test yourself.
Mahabharata’s tales as old as time at Perth Festival
A single theatrical show attempts to give voice to a sprawling ancient Hindu text about what it means to be human.