It’s multi-stranded, with the stories of different people or groups running parallel for a significant portion of the book. This is the criticism I could most understand, because partway through the novel’s second half I felt the momentum flag a little, which I put down to the structure. The over-riding criticism was that it was repetitive and tedious. This realisation is unsettling, and clever, because it forces non-indigenous readers to switch identification from the colonisers to the colonised. Before halfway, all is revealed, and we realise we are not reading historical fiction, but speculative fiction set in some near future. It is, as a result, not about indigenous Australians versus white colonists, but about colonised people of all races versus settler-colonists (“grey fellas”) from somewhere else. Coleman’s world of Settlers and Natives, of Troopers and Trackers, of Missions to which stolen children are taken for education, of a Department for the Protection of Natives, and so on, mimics colonial Western Australia in particular, but it’s not long before hints start to appear that all is not as we’ve assumed. Terra nullius starts off reading like an historical fiction novel about the colonial settlement of Australia and the concurrent dispossession of our indigenous people. In doing so, I’ll also draw on GoodReads because its users tend to be general readers, like you finding reading groups.įirst though, a brief introduction for those who don’t know the book.
I may not have got all the issues down, or down correctly, but I’ll give it my best shot. I didn’t take notes at the meeting, so I’m relying on my memory.
In fact that I was the only one who liked it. So, instead of my usual review, I’ve decided to tease out some of the issues my group had with the book, and see where I end up. The first two – An unnecessary woman ( my review) and The sympathizer ( my review) were well liked – but not so Coleman’s book. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra nullius, was my reading group’s third book for this year.
0 kommentar(er)
