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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Hunting a Tasmanian tiger, denouncing the '60s generation, loving Graham Greene and unveiling family secrets in the best fall fiction.
Oct 23, 2000 | We confess: This month we found ourselves slogging through a lot of bad books in order to bring back the handful of trophies we offer you here. There were lackluster short story collections, novels with no plots, novels with preposterous plots, novels with irritating narrators and novels that just didn't hang together. But enough complaining because, dear readers, we filter out the dreck so that you don't have to.
Instead, we urge you to spend your ripening fall evenings wisely -- on Julia Leigh's tough-minded story of a professional hunter tracking the last Tasmanian tiger into the troubling shadows of his own mind, or on Michel Houellebecq's perverse, corrosive fictional indictment of contemporary hedonism, or on Nomi Eve's lush family saga or on any of the other great books listed below.
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The Hunter
By Julia Leigh
Four Walls Eight Windows, 176 pages
On the basis of this slim and astringent first novel, Australian Julia Leigh, 30, is being hailed as the antipodal Annie Proulx. It's easy to see why: Leigh writes the same kind of wintry, even brittle sentences as Proulx; she vivifies her cool, rugged landscapes with tart descriptions of natural arcana; and she gives scant attention to the more tender elements of her characters' serrated lives, choosing instead to fling them into the pits she creates and then chart, with a kind of forensic detachment, their efforts to claw their way out.
Leigh's protagonist, in fact, doesn't even merit the gentle favor of a name. "M," as Leigh calls him, is a professional hunter who's been dispatched to a remote corner of the Tasmanian plateau to kill the last remaining thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger thought extinct since 1936. One female is alleged to still exist, and M's employer, a shadowy biotech company, wants it dead. (An unfortunate implausibility, but we'll get to that later.) Following the trail blazed by a naturalist who disappeared on the plateau, M establishes his base camp at the home of the naturalist's grief-wrecked wife, Lucy, and their two unruly children. From there he makes weekly forays into the bush, immersing himself so deeply in the thylacine's life that after a while he fears he himself is being hunted. And in a way he is: M, who's made disassociating himself from people his life's main tenet, finds himself being drawn further and further into the lives of Lucy and her children, hunted by his own humanity -- prey, like the thylacine, to his very instincts.
Leigh's debut resonates with ambitious echoes -- she counts "Moby Dick," for instance, as an inspiration -- and almost lives up to them. So much so, in fact, that you want to excuse the novel for its chief shortcoming: namely, the improbably nefarious roots of M's mission. Leigh tries to tiptoe around that pothole, but it's a doozy, and mustering up the "willing suspension of disbelief," as Coleridge famously put it, requires a bit of readerly exertion. But Leigh's stern, bristly prose is more than reward for that effort; her icy talent warrants heralding far beyond the antipodes.
-- Jonathan Miles
