BOOK REVIEW
From my review of Limberlost you will remember I am a fan of Robbie Arnott so I am delighted that his fourth book is here, Dusk, which encapsulates his signature style and exemplifies why he is the recipient of several literary awards.
We have expectations about the kind of book this author is likely to conjure, and he again foregrounds the natural world in Dusk, braiding its beauty and violence into a narrative bracing and propulsive which sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored.
Dusk features vivid descriptive prose and a concern for the environment and our place within, it generates with a delicate literary ability and mixes genres while keeping a strong semblance of realism.
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds, again the folly of humans is writ large, pumas were originally introduced to control the deer population that was overzealously eating the propagated grasses, but they turned, instead, to the sheep and what more would you expect.
Down in the lowlands we are introduced to Dusk’s protagonists’ itinerant twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw who rely on and complement each other and have done so for the entirety of their 37 years.
They have suffered a terrible life and are out of work, money and friends.
The narrative flows back and forth in time, moving from the twins’ current exploits to tracking their woebegone history with recidivist parents who passed on their criminality, and blighted the surname Renshaw, “a barbed gift delivered at birth”.
They decide to traverse the Tasmanian highlands in search of the South American puma rumoured to be the last of its kind, when they hear that a bounty has been placed on her head, as she has not only menaced and decimated livestock but also taken the lives of several men.
As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined and as they close in on their prey, they are forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
Dusk plays with mythical elements.
All around the highlands are bones the provenance of which is still an unanswerable mystery.
Are they the fossilised remnants of prehistoric creatures or ancient sea beasts when the plateau was once a seabed?
Dusk is also about love and loss, about unbreakable sibling bonds, and most likely, because of their compromised upbringing, Floyd and Iris soon learn to forego others.
Their palpable connection and closeness make my heart melt; Robbie Arnott completely nailed their relationship, which at its core reveals the fierce protectiveness both siblings possess for one another, even through the toughest circumstances.
Animal instincts are what the twins rely on to survive – there is one sequence where Iris and Floyd remember feeding on stolen oysters, caught up in the beauty of phosphorescence: “They had scarcely stopped to focus on anything that did not feed, warm or protect them. For a few moments they stood still. For once not rushing, running, not fighting the rough grip of a hard world”.
