Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Chatto and Windus $255 AUSTRALIAN David Malouf has published eight novels, five books of poetry, an autobiography and some opera libretti. His most recent book Remembering Babylon is up for the Booker Prize this year.
The story deals with the settling of Australia in the 19th century and the effort by some settlers to overcome the perverse racism that prevents immigrants from the crowded tenements of Great Britain from sharing this huge continent with the aborigines.
Mr Malouf pursues this theme with a curious double focus which never comes quite clear, an effect doomed from the outset to be ineffective.
The first focal point concerns a young man who emerges from the bush and is ''rescued'' by a family of white settlers. He represents the dangers the whites fear from the aborigines though he is himself a white man thrown overboard from a passing ship several years earlier.
The second focal point concerns the McIvor family who take the waif in, care for him, and try to protect him and themselves from the increasing malevolence and violence of their neighbours.
The premise might be persuasive but it is surely stacked against the native Australians. That Gemmy is in fact a white man never stalls the neighbours for a second, even though Gemmy, who inhabits a mental world full of aboriginal spirits, does little more than teach the local minister how to find and use local plant life.
In one episode, two aborigines do visit Gemmy in his white outpost. They are seen by whites who then try to murder Gemmy. But no full-scale confrontation between whites and blacks takes place in the novel, so Gemmy's presence produces no real danger except in the thick minds of the white settlers.