Andrew McGahan: The White Earth

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Suspended as we New Zealanders are in turbulent debate over issues of land ownership and attachment, Australian writer Andrew McGahan's third novel seems to wade right into the fray, with a story that hinges around the powerful feelings people, both indigenous and more recently settled, develop for the land.

"We can have connections with the land too, our own kind of magic," a white farmer insists.

It's a powerful work, filled with passion and a kind of surreal grandiosity. It's also a grim story, packed with loss and failure, and adults who are so flawed, embittered and selfish that they load all their own pathetic hopes on to the ill, thin shoulders of the 9-year-old boy at the heart of the story, almost killing him in the process.

When William is almost 9, his father dies in a fire on his unsuccessful, near-bankrupt farm. William's mother, mentally ill and unempathetic, takes her son to live with a stern, bitter uncle who lives alone (except for a vindictive housekeeper) in a ruined station homestead, Kuran House.

Stories run parallel: of the uncle's life, which is mostly one of destructive compulsion to own Kuran, and what it costs him to achieve this; and of William in the story's present, 1997, in the lead-up to the Mabo decision on Aboriginal entitlement to ancestral lands.

His uncle is the head of a rightwing settlers' rights organisation of the Pauline Hanson, One Nation variety, and so the book is full of political/emotional discussion about just what land entitlement entails.

Increasingly desperate to become his uncle's heir, and to understand the enormous stretch of land on which the ruin sits, William is also increasingly ill, although no adults seem to notice or care.

The book's underlying question is what happened to the original occupants of the land around the station, and that comes shockingly into focus towards the book's end, the answer suddenly merging all the strands of the story, and tying past to present.

McGahan is known as a crime writer, so this is a new departure for him, although the gothic darkness of this novel, and its sense of danger and suspense, more than hint at his earlier writing.

William's insightfulness is sometimes beyond belief, and yet for the most part he is as any victimised child would be: an innocent trying to please, but with only a partial understanding of the world he must play a role in -- an unforgettable, tragic character.

Perhaps the metaphor is over-obvious: a rotting house, lives constructed around ignorance, lies, theft and murder, and no simple solutions in sight. A story for our time, in fact.

Still, it's a truly compelling story, to blame for an awfully late night for this reader. It reverberates long after it's been finished, dark notes of sadness, and just a little tinge of hopefulness to lighten the load.

* Allen & Unwin, $35