Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

Paperback, 1994

Description

David Malouf's novel--shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize--is a masterpiece. In the mid-1840s, a thirteen year old boy is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of security in an alien, half-mythological land, hopeful yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Genres

General Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

Vintage (1994), 224 pages

User reviews

LibraryThing member Kristelh

Remembering Babylon is a powerful book. So much to think about. On the surface, this is a story of pioneer life in Australia. The time period is the 1840s, Gemmy Farley is cast off a boat on the far north of Australia. He is raised by aborigines until the Europeans arrive. He tries to join them.

Gemmy doesn't fit anywhere. This is a story of isolation, language and communication.

I also saw Gemmy as a Christ like figure. Our first picture of him is a man balancing on the rail with his arms flung out and the book ends with that image repeated in memory and the the statement "their need to draw him into their lives--love, again love--overbalanced but not yet falling." Because of Gemmy, people started seeing things differently or became more aware of themselves. "Others felt it but did not know, and the less they knew the more openly hostile they grew; these were the ones you had to watch out for." Even the title of the book lets us know that there is a Biblical reference here.

There is also the theme of colonialism. When immigrants come to a new land they try to make it like the old land instead of learning to live on the land as it has been created. Gemmy is of the land. He has learned to live in this new land. "The land up there was his mother, the only one he had ever known. It belonged to him as he did to it; not by birth but by second birth, a gift..."

Then there is the bees. The bees with their power to communicate. This land is like the Biblical land? A land of milk and honey?

This book was short listed for the Booker Prize and won the inaugural IMPAC Award. Great book.

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LibraryThing member PennyAnne

This book is beyond my powers of description. I felt lifted up by Malouf's language and imagery - so many times in such a short book I found myself blown away by his mastery over words and his ability to evoke whole worlds and emotional territories through carefully crafted prose - incredibly

impressive.

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LibraryThing member skippersan

The setting is the north Australian frontier in the 19th century. Into a small, xenophobic community of Scottish immigrants stumbles a white boy, hardly even recognizable as human. The boy, one Gemmy Fairley, says “Do not shoot, I am a B-b-british object,” and thus begins the story. Gemmy is a

castaway who was rescued by aborigines and has survived for several years in the wilderness until this contact. Having fallen overboard when he was very young, he cannot read or write and can now only recall a few English words. But he is a catalyst to all who meet him. For some, he is a threat, for others a treasury of botanical and zoological information, for others still a harmless and helpless visitor. For all, his presence is that of an alien other—one who sees them, communicates with them, thinks about them, and perhaps judges them.

Malouf’s writing is magical. The story unfolds as meaning dictates, not according to chronology, the same incident sometime receiving multiple treatments from different perspectives. Flashbacks and forays in other spatial or temporal directions help define the landscape of transformation at the settlement. The McIvors, at whose farm Gemmy first appeared, take him in but soon find themselves at odds with their neighbors when the community’s fear of the unknown landscape comes to be directed at Gemmy himself.

Throughout, the pages are filled with startling insights and memorable images making each paragraph a delight. I especially loved the passages describing how some characters became able to see, really see, the world they had lived in and struggled to subdue for so many sweat-blind years. It’s a novel of emerging consciousness told with grace and charm and compassion. I recommend it highly.

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LibraryThing member technodiabla

I found this book to be enjoyable, interesting, and meaningful-- a trifecta! Malouf's writing style is straightforward and uncomplicated (except for the Scotch-Aussie dialect which was really fun to read.) The story itself is just perfect. Every character is tenderly rendered and so human, so

vulnerable. The interactions between the characters, though subtle, reveal so much about interpersonal politics that is timeless and universal. It's so true it maddening.

The story of Gemmy is one of xenophobia, language and cultural barriers, Colonial mindset of natural superiority, and the loneliness of being an outsider. Some of my favorite passages:

"...yet when, as sometime happened, he fell back on the native word, the only one that could express it, their eyes went hard, as if the mere existence of a language they did not know was a provocation, a way of making them helpless."

"Slipping out into the dark he would track night-scented flowers in the summer woods, or with breathing suspended and his whole body alert, observe from a hide, in the soft night air and a liquid light with its own colours, the life of creatures that were abroad, as he was, while the human world slept. That was the joy of the thing. While the eyes of others were closed...to look in on a part of creation that is secret, but only because it lives in a different time zone from that of men."

I just found something to like or at least empathize with in every character (except Sir George perhaps). The ending was even pretty satisfying and the fence imagery from the beginning was perfectly woven through to the end. This is a fantastic book that can really open ones eyes to the ridiculousness of some darker aspects of human nature. Everyone should read this book. 5 stars

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LibraryThing member hughryder

Gemmy, a young boy, is cast adrift off the coast of Australia in the 1840's. He survives with the help of Aboriginal people, but finds his way to a white family on a farm where children initially meet him. Gemmy doesn't seem to fit in white society and eventually returns to the Aboriginal tribe.

Interesting concept but jumps around in time too much and tends to be slow and lugubrious. Not such a great read.

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LibraryThing member readingwithtea

"Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, as long as there are two of them"

In David Malouf's IMPAC-winning novel (novelette? 182 pages), a group of children in 1840s Queensland happen across a young man, unkempt and racially white, but exhibiting behaviour they and their community expect of the

local Aborigines. The community is changed forever by Gemmy's arrival.

I don't understand how this won the IMPAC and was shortlisted for the Booker. It's So Incredibly Uninteresting. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters, the setting, the writing, just any of it. Maybe that's a criterion for book prizes.

Each chapter is from a different character's point of view - we get Gemmy, Lachlan (the boy who found him), Janet (Lachlan's jealous cousin), Jock (Janet's father), the teacher... and none of them is an interesting person by themselves. There are some vague hints of interesting colonial life (dialogue is written in a strange Scotch hybrid sometimes) but it's not explored. The writing is... meh. It's not even exhilerating writing.

Urgh. Take it away from me.

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LibraryThing member edwinbcn

Remembering Babylon by the Australian author David Malouf is a novel set in the colonial history of Australia. The novel opens strongly, as Gemmy, the European "savage" boy from the wilderness emerges and is taken back into civilization, a settlement of colonists. However, the embrace is not warm.

In the perception of the colonists, Gemmy develops from a curiosity into a threat. The boy becomes the focus point of the settlers fears of the unknown, and towards the end, after an attempted murder, the reader is left wondering who is more savage.

The novel beautifully depicts early colonial life, evoking vivid images of Australia. The language is beautiful. A very enjoyable read.

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LibraryThing member leslie.98

Interesting premise - 1840's Australia, a 13 year-old English boy is found on a beach in Australia by aborigines. 16 years later, he approaches British settlers... Well-written but what was disappointing is the fact that Gemmy's life with the aborigines is glossed over in a few paragraphs. His

character didn't feel real to me & I found the racism of the settlers disturbing (although probably historically accurate). This reads more like a character study of group dynamics in an isolated environment than the type of historical fiction adventure I was expecting.

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LibraryThing member Fernhill

Interesting story of the effect of an outsider coming to a tightly bound community.

LibraryThing member Vivl

At one point the main character, the castaway Gemmy, is described as having "a kind of grandeur that went painfully to the heart." The same could be said of this novel.

The third Malouf I have read and another blinder. I confess to having been a bit nervous for two reasons: I thought that I might

hit a dud this time (the last several reviews here on LibraryThing were not positive) or that his writing would start to seem "same-y". Neither fear was justified.

The hallmarks of Malouf's writing are certainly here again: his compassion, highlighted in beautifully and simply-drawn character studies evoking sympathy with even the more unpleasant characters once you are allowed to peep beside their façades, his intelligence and his capacity to write sparse yet rich and intensely visual descriptive text, but the story impressed me as fresh and non-derivative.

This was the perfect antidote to my sad foray into Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Thank you, Mr Malouf!

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LibraryThing member ashleyk44

I read this for a class on British Lit Post-WWII. It's one of those books that I know I wouldn't have picked up off a shelf on my own, but I enjoyed it. Malouf uses a lot of imagery to convey the emotions in both characters and the community as they cope in their own ways with Gemmy. A very

interesting story about a white man who is lost overboard a ship as a child, and raised by the aborigines until he comes upon a settlement of whites. Definitely an intriguing look at race (he is known among the settlers as the "black-white man"), community, and identity.

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LibraryThing member TimBazzett

REMEMBERING BABYLON, by David Malouf.

My second Malouf novel. I was very impressed with his THE GREAT WORLD, and this one, while not quite as ambitious, is nearly as good, with its depiction of 19th century Australia, up in the undeveloped 'sticks' above Brisbane, when that town was little more than

a glorified 'village.' Malouf again creates some memorable characters and manages to weave a lesson of predjudice and fear into this tale set on the outer fringes of a tenuous civilization. Gemmy, an illiterate and much abused white British orphan, who spent sixteen years in a tribe of aborigines after being pitched overboard from his ship, rejoins a rough-edged white society, which turns out to be less tolerant than that of the so-called 'savages.' You get thumbnail lives of not just Gemmy, but of the brave white family that takes him in, as well as the local preacher, school teacher and others. And the fear, hate and loathing that follows Gemmy rears its ugly head again fifty years later as Australia enters WWII and turns on some German emigrant citizens. For a book of barely two hundred pages, Malouf's story packs a powerful punch. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy Australian fiction.

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LibraryThing member dbsovereign

A bit muddled, this book still stands out for having created a splendidly-written story about cultures clashing. Poetic in its rendering, Malouf makes us see the world with a different set of eyes.

LibraryThing member amerynth

David Malouf's "Remembering Babylon" is an interesting book. It wasn't at all on my radar until it was selected as a group read so I didn't go into it with any expectations. I mostly enjoyed the book though it felt like the story wasn't entirely complete -- it was rough around the edges, but still

readable and enjoyable.

The story focuses on Gemmy, a cabin boy who was cast ashore on Australia by sailors. He lived among the aborigines until walking onto a settler's farm some years later, where he is greeted with a mixture of astonishment and distrust.

Malouf introduces all the characters and then focuses on their back stories -- showing how they came to be where they are when the story opened. There was a lot of discussion about the final chapter in my book group -- which makes a somewhat jarring transition to the future. I didn't mind it though -- it was interesting to see where the characters ended up.

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LibraryThing member buttsy1

All the characters in this extraordinary book see themselves as "the outsider", but because of their shared colonial pioneering position, they make Gemmy the outsider.
I thoroughly enjoyed the way David Malouf introduces the bare bones of the story, and then gives us the back story on so many of the

characters.
There is suspicion and distrust, compassion and understanding, despair and struggle.

My daughter had been assigned 'Remembering Babylon' as part of a literature course in her university studies, and had left it at my place when she'd finished. I am so grateful.

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LibraryThing member therebelprince

One of the most astonishing pieces of Australian writing I have ever read. It's no secret that Malouf is one of our national treasures, but Remembering Babylon is something else entirely. Written from a dozen or so perspectives, each absorbing in its accuracy, Malouf turns his eye in this short

novel to the complexities of colonialism, specifically among white, rural Australians in the 1860s. Less than a century after the country was colonised, a small town (village?) of white people struggle with the introduction amongst them of a white man who has been living with Indigenous people for 16 years. Their concern about whether he has completely lost "it", their fear of the unknown - anything beyond view of their steeple - and that uncomfortable, uneasy relationship with their own colonialism, their sense of inferiority to the mother country, and the social and cultural clashes between neighbours that have made up every society since time immemorial... all captured in fewer than 200 pages.

Malouf smartly chooses not to write from the Indigenous perspective - he has rightly said that no white person in Australia can really do that - but gives us enough touches through Gemmy's point of view that we understand the true tragedy of colonialism, as symbolised through Janet's relationship with her bees. Being able to see them communicate but not quite understand how, and wondering if you knew it once, is a thought that has often haunted me, and remains haunting.

By 1860, my ancestors were well settled in Australia, their children becoming young adults and soon to have children of their own. My relationship with this land - as a white, rural-born, gay, intellectual, urbanite - is a complex one, and so is my relationship with the attempted genocide my ancestors perpetuated. Although the killing ended long ago, the cultural suppression continued well into the 1960s - the decade of my parents' birth - and we live with a lineage of divided privilege, culture, and sentiment. Compared to our neighbours "across the pond", New Zealand, who charted a very different 19th century, it is very telling.

To return to Malouf's work, his prose is tight, almost silhouetting the situations that occur, using the characters' summations of moments and often sidestepping detail, to leave us caught in the shadow between the people involved. It's a strange, sometimes surprisingly synopsis-like approach to writing, and yet it somehow produces a staggering effect. This is a quintessential Australian novel, one that examines our tortured history without unfairly chastising. The relationship between white and black is one key theme, but so is the relationship between home and away. Even now in 2018, the so-called "cultural cringe" remains strong in Australia. We have a fractious relationship with the UK, and within ourselves about the UK - the proximity to "the world", the lengthy history and culture, the feeling that we have been distanced from so much cultural understanding through the fault of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. We often discuss this in the context of Australia's newer migrant families, but I can attest it remains strong in an eighth-generation Australian like myself. To peer into the minds of people who themselves remember the mother country, or - even worse - have heard it from everyone around them but are themselves inexperienced, is a gift in the hands of Malouf.

Perhaps this is a work about questions, not about answers. The answers are for us to find - if, indeed, we ever can.

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