Remembering Babylon
Remembering Babylon is a book by David Malouf written in 1993. It won the inaugural International Dublin Literary 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, Gemmy Fairley, who is marooned on a foreign land and is raised by a group of aborigines, natives to the land in Queensland. 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. The narrative was influenced by the experiences of James Morrill, a shipwreck survivor who lived with Aboriginal people in North Queensland for 17 years from 1846 to 1863. Style and themes. 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 most whole 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. Key quotations. 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) Andy McKillop talking about Gemmy and the Aboriginals: ‘He may be harmless, but they aren’t, they aren’t fucken harmless.’ pp. 90 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.