Most of us connect magical realism with the lushness of tropical Latin America, especially in the works of the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But the genre knows no borders, and finds its way in Sarah Rossetti’s often-dazzling new novel to land slap-bang in the aridness of the Nullarbor Plain. Dust and flies are hardly the stuff of imaginary worlds, so with all the literary confidence of a born diviner, Rossetti places water at the heart of the story. In doing so, she follows examples by two of Australia’s most successful writers: Tim Winton’s Breath and Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, both of whom embrace the hybrid ground that increasingly traverses young adult and adult fiction. As those works did, Rossetti’s imagined world – filled with a diverse range of fascinating characters – deserves to make its way onto the screen as a fully-realised movie. (The novel began as a lengthy poem, also called “Nullarbor Pearl”, metamorphosised into a short film, Pilbara Pearl, before returning to the Nullarbor fiction setting.) When eighteen-year-old Pearl decides to uproot from her claustrophobic, troubled existence in Perth, abandoned by her father and dismissed by her mother, she heads east into the endless unknown – a journey that immediately brings to mind two literary/cinematic tropes, the road movie and the vastness of the Outback. She’s on a bus when she meets Eddie, a young knockabout drifter who spends his life fixing windmills. Pearl is Indigenous, Eddie is White. There’s a spark of course to get things rolling, but Eddie is the pragmatist and Pearl’s apparently the dreamer. (Themes of identity and reconciliation run like aquifers beneath the novel’s surface, even more notably in the wake of the failed Voice referendum.) Into the picture steps, or rides on his motorbike, the Italian cave diver Massimo: the love interest splits three ways, and who get the girl? Possibly no-one, because Pearl is on a greater quest: to shake off a family curse. This is where the magical realism takes off. Stopping at her aunt’s rundown highway roadhouse, Pearl becomes fascinated by a fish tank. It’s nothing special to the rest of us, but for Pearl it’s another world, which she enters simply by dunking her head fully into the tank, holding her breath as long as possible, and navigating an aquatic expanse that opens endless vistas of possibilities and danger. Perhaps the tank offers a chance to solve the mystery that has plagued all the women in her line, starting with her Great-Grandma Pearl. As a literary device it’s effective, and convincing – swiftly switched worlds that match Pearl’s own dichotomies about her family past and own future. How long can she keep her head underwater? One minute, two minutes? How long do you need to find the answer that will take you forward on the highway of life? With a snappy tongue, Pearl comes alive as the novel’s main character: she’s tough but not aggressive, sensitive to the world around her, but determined to find the answers she seeks. ‘Do what you like,’ someone says to her. ‘You always do.’ An elliptical narrative filled with big ideas under the cover of Australian slang and colloquialisms, Nullarbor Pearl mixes magic and harsh Outback realities, gritty dialogue and ethereal visions to produce a must-read for young adults and adult readers alike. 5 Stars! – Tony Maniaty, author and Weekend Australian reviewer Loading...
