Limberlost, by Robbie Arnott

Latent Book Club Review #2304

The Latent Book Club reviews 2023 Miles Franklin shortlisted novel Limberlost, an excellent coming of age story set in Tasmania, by Australian Author Robbie Arnott.🇦🇺🚣‍♂️

Limberlost is a first-rate, bitter-sweet bildungsroman set in Tasmania, during the First World War. It is author Robbie Arnott’s third novel, and, as we’ve previously discussed at The Latent Book Club, was shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin award.

The protagonist is Ned, a young boy coming of age during the First World War. Ned lives with his family: his stoic, pent-up, and possibly post traumatic suffering father, and relatively quiet sister in Tasmania. His two brothers are sent out to fight, leaving Ned, father and sister at home on the family farm, looking after the orchard.

Ned is wracked by insecurities which he is unequipped to handle. This level of anxiety is common amongst children. Arnott does not (properly, in keeping with the character) give it the adult voice we might call neuroticism in someone older. Neds’ insecurity and introspection is juxtaposed with the seeming certitude of a domineering father: quiet, stoic, but we suspect keeping a handle on a level of violence that bubbles beneath the surface.

The constant proximity of violence its notable throughout the book. Not, it must be said, in a way that seems brutal or terrifying, but as a fact of life. In this way it It is a Hobbsean violence, to be found in the state of nature: It is there in the nature of the country in which Limberlost (Ned’s family orchard) is found. It is there in the trapping, killing and skinning of rabbits, which Ned does with some industry to fund his purchase of a boat. And it is there in the proximate war: a threat on the horizon, violent, but at bay - for now.

The novel commences with an encounter with a whale in the river mouth that Ned experiences with his father, and brothers. In many ways Ned spends the majority of this book trying to recapture, or claim this memory. And although Ned cannot identify what possesses him, we are left in little doubt that this is why he wants to buy the boat which provides the story’s narrative arc.

Ned dreams of boats. What they mean for him, what he could do in the freedom that he’ll give him. And through his quest to possess one - by killing and skinning the rabbits whose pelts he sells to be made into hats for soldiers - the novel finds its central theme. Interspersed in Ned’s quest are flash-fowards to Ned’s future. These increase in temperature and intensity throughout the book: until past, present, and future collide making for a magnificent and emotionally poignant ending.

The best things about Limberlost are the visceral descriptions of Tasmania. You could smell it. You could feel it: the heat, the oil from the trees, the fragrance of the boat’s wood. The deep connections to land the Arnott clearly really understands. The colonial legacy that is a part of the land also gets a mention in a way that is clever - neither condescending, nor contrived.

Several features of the book are tragic.  Ned’s deceased mother, whose favourite novel gave the family orchard its name of Limberlost, his anxieties regarding his brothers off fighting in a war, the threat of the orchard’s financial ruin, and the personal tragedies affecting his adult life are all things that give the book an emotional resonance.

This sense of tragedy is most notable with the precocity in which the boat exists in the novel. The boat is Ned’s treasure: something that he has been working towards so avidly, and something that fundamentally affects his life. But it exists ephemerally. The ability of ephemeral artefacts to shape and colour a life is a central feature of tragedy, and bildungsromans - and make no mistake, Limberlost contains aspects of the fundamentally tragic.

Take, for instance, Hew Morgan’s house in Robert Lwellyn’s How Green Was My Valley?; William Stoner’s one brief, genuine romance in John William’s Stoner, or even Carl Fredricksen’s relationship with his wife, and house in Disney’s UP!. The things in these works are there for some time, and are ultimately destroyed, but have such resonance their erstwhile existence make those who they touch forever altered.  This is the effect the boat has on Ned. There is an echo of this in the nature of Ned’s relationship with his wife, and how she is affected by the development of his orchard as an adult.

Limberlost’s future projections enable us to visualise an grown, and even fading Ned - never entirely different from the boy we knew, but fundamentally influenced by his experience at Limberlost, his relationship with his brothers, his father, and the land. It underscores the failures and joys we all experience as humans,  and the difficult decisions we must make in attempting to identify what we value most. Ned generally comes down on the side of his family - few would not - but these choices are not, as Arnott reminds us, necessarily easy. And nor do they necessarily have the capacity to take you in the desired direction in any event.

Limberlost is a complex, compelling book which is worthy of being on anyone’s to read list.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5) 🇦🇺🚣‍♂️