Remembering Babylon

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Remembering Babylon is a book by David Malouf written in 1993. It won the inaugural IMPAC Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award.

The novel covers themes of isolation, language, relationships (particularly those between men), community and living on the edge (of society, consciousness, culture).

Its themes evolve into a greater narrative of an English boy, Gimmy Fairley, who is marooned on a foreign land and is raised by a group of aborigines, natives to the land. When white settlers reach the area, he attempts to move back in the world of Europeans. As Gemmy wrestles with his own identity, the community of settlers struggle to deal with their fear of the unknown. [1] From Reading Group Guide:Quote:

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon. We hope they will aid your understanding of a novel that presents readers with the verbal energy of a prose poem (and with some of the finest nature writing since D. H. Lawrence's), a psychological discernment worthy of Virginia Woolf, and the thematic resonance of an Australian Genesis. In the case of Remembering Babylon, the myth is that of the settling of Australia and of the fateful contact between white Europeans and black aborigines.

That contact--and all its tragic repercussions and missed possibilities--is represented by the sudden appearance, in an unnamed Queensland settlement in the 1840s, of Gemmy Fairley, an English castaway who was rescued by aborigines and has lived among them for sixteen years before crossing into the territory claimed by his countrymen. With his sun-blackened face and straw-white hair, his twitching gait and few, inarticulate scraps of English, Gemmy is a confusing--and increasingly suspicious--figure to his new hosts. On a practical level, some settlers fear that Gemmy is a spy sent by the aborigines, who are thought to have massacred settlers elsewhere in the new territory. But he also represents the dread possibility that civilization, language--whiteness itself--are qualities as provisional as their farms and tumbledown shacks. Looking at Gemmy, they find themselves wondering, "Could you lose it? Not just language but it. It." [p. 40]

In time these suspicions prove too great, the gulf between cultures too insurmountable: Gemmy is beaten and driven away. His few allies, the Scots farmer Jock McIvor, his nephew Lachlan Beattie, his elder daughter Janet, and the botanizing Reverend Frazer, are permanently estranged from their community--and indeed, from their ingenuous former selves. In that outcome, David Malouf sees a fall from grace that has implicated succeeding generations of European Australians, a loss of the potential self embodied in this "in-between creature" [p. 28] who was neither wholly white nor wholly black but "a true child of the place as it will one day be." [p. 132] Drawing on the true story of Gemmy Morril, Malouf has created a haunting, melancholy, and stunningly written parable of the limits of imagination and the intractibility of human nature, of the moment in which two peoples met on the ground of a new world--and one of them turned away.

(End quote.)

Malouf's narrative voice is at once scattered and singular, skipping between perspectives on the same events, and forcing the reader to pay close attention to each character's rendering in order to arrive at the wholest truth possible. The magical-realism theme is cultivated in the exaggerated response of all the characters to mundane items: Gemmy surrenders to what he knows is a stick instead of a gun, because he attributes Lachlan's aiming it at him as a signal of the wariness of the other settlers. The men of the community are in an uproar over a stone that visiting aborigines (supposedly) pass off to Gemmy for no logical reason--only because they fear whatever knowledge the aborigines have garnered of the land. These settlers are the first whites to live on that soil, and view anything that is not white with an extreme wariness, not only of the physical land but the spiritual sense of the place.

Gemmy is at once an extremely simple and extraordinarily cunning character. He seems to live by intuition, instead of by plotting. Much of the time it is easiest to think of him as a rather clever dog, loyal and yet manipulative.

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[edit] Key Quotes

Gemmy is first shown at the fence between the European settlement, and the aborigine lands, about to fall onto the white side while three European children watched.

"The creature or spirit in him had spoken up, having all along had the words in there that would betray him and which, when they came hooting out of his mouth, so astonished him: Do not shoot. I am a B-b-british object."(p.33)

Gemmy contemplating Janet:

"She was a puzzle to him. He could never be sure what she was thinking. He knew the boy's thoughts because he wanted them known. His power lay in your recognizing that he possessed it. It was a power that belonged to him because he was a boy; because one day, the authority he had claimed in raising the stick to his shoulder would be real. The girl's power was entirely her own. She needed no witness to it."(p. 36)

"He was a parody of a white man."(p.39)

The settlers:

"For at any moment--and this was the fact of the matter--they might be overwhelmed."(p.42)

"What you fix your gaze on is the little hard-backed flies that are crawling about in the corner of its bloodshot eyes and hopping down at intervals to drink the sweat of its lip. And the horror it carries to you is not just the smell, in your own sweat, of a half-forgotten swamp-world going back deep in both of you, but that for him, as you meet here face to face in the sun, you and all you stand for have not yet appeared over the horizon of the world, so that after a moment all the wealth of it goes dim in you, then is canceled altogether, and you meet at last in a terrifying equality that strips the last rags from your soul and leaves you so far out on the edge of yourself that your fear now is that you may never go back. It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly and the encounter was an embrace."(p.43)

Gemmy's influence on the McIvor spouses.

Was he changed? He saw now that he must be, since they were as they had always been and he could not agree with them. When had it begun? When they agreed to take Gemmy in. That was the simple answer, since it was from that moment that some area of difference, of suspicion, had opened between them. But tht emore he thought of it, the clearer it seemed that the difference must have always existed, since he too was as he had always been; only he had been blind to it, or had put it out of his mind from an old wish to be accepted - and why not? - or a fear of standing alone. He had never been a thinker, and he did not now become one, but he began to have strange thoughts. Some of them were bitter. They had to do with what he saw, now that he looked, was in the hearts of men - quite ordinary folks like himself; he wondered that he had not seen it before. What the other and stranger thoughts had to do with he did not know. It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable self, wrapped always ina communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a place out there where the self might stand alone. Wading through waist-high grass, he was surprised to see all the tips beaded with green, as if some new growth had come into the world that till now he had never seen or heard of. When he looked closer it was hundreds of wee bright insects, each the size of his little fingernail, metallic, iridescent, and the discovery of them, the new light they brough to the scene, was a lightness in him - that was what surprised him - like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him, but was also exhilarating; for a moment he was entirely happy. But he wondered at himself. A grown man of forty with work to do, standing dreamily stilled, extending his hand, palm downwards, over the backs of insects, all suspended in their tiny lives in a jewel-like glittering. Another time, by the creek, he looked up, casually he thought, and saw a bird. It was balanced on a rounded stone dipping its beak into the lightly running water, its grey squat body as undistinguished and dusty looking as a sparrow's (but there were no sparrows here), its head grey, with a few untidy feathers. He was sitting, himself, on a larger stone, also rounded, eating the last of a sandwich, his boots in mud. But what his stilled blood saw was the bird's beak drawing long silver threads out of the heart of the water, which was all a tangle of threads, bunched or running; and his boots had no weight, neither did his hand with the half-bitten lump of bread in it, nor his heart, and he was filled with the most intense and easy pleasure: in the way the air stirred the leaves overhead and each leaf had attached itself to a twig, and whirled yet kept hold; and in the layered feathers that made up the grey of the bird's head; and at how long the threads of water must be to run so easily from where they had come from to wherever it was, imaginably out of sight, that they were going - tangling, untangling, running free. And this time too the intense pleasure he felt had a disturbing side. The things he had begun to be aware of, however fresh and innocent, lay outside what was common, or so he thought; certainly, since he could have found no form in which to communicate them, outside words. (p.108-109)