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Summary
Summary
"This ambitious novel has earned Susan Elderkin the distinction from Granta as one of the ""Best Young British Writers Under 40."" Cressida Connolly, in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), raved, ""Part fable, part coming-of-age story, [The Voices] attempts to describe the demise of an entire culture through only a handful of lives. Certainly brilliant... Beautifully written, melancholy, fey, angry and utterly absorbing."" In the remote, bloodred dust of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint turns to the stark landscape and mesmerizing spirits of the native Aborigines. He is befriended by an enigmatic Aboriginal girl, Maisie, and slowly comes to realize he is meddling with powers far beyond his control. Ten years later, Billy lies in a hospital bed, recovering from gruesome wounds of mysterious origin. Shifting between his hospital stay and the childhood that led him there, The Voices unfolds into a haunting exploration of the relationship between a white man, the land he loves, and the native spirits of the country struggling to be heard before they are lost forever."
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The ancestral voices of aborigine spirits play a prominent role in Elderkin's second novel (after Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains), the erratic story of a white boy's coming of age. Billy Saint grows up identifying with kangaroos and communing with nature near his tiny village north of Alice Springs, tendencies that bewilder his mother, Crystal, and her passive husband, Stan, a car mechanic. Billy's troubles begin when he is 16 and he meets a mysterious native girl named Maisie during his wanderings. On an expedition they take together in a car Billy borrows from his father, Maisie calls on hostile spirits and Billy flees, hitting a kangaroo and barely making it home. His injuries include an odd genital mutilation, which happens to be part of an aborigine ritual. Soon after the incident, Billy runs away and becomes a miner, only to encounter the spirits years later, in his early 20s. Most of the story is told in extended flashbacks as the adult Billy lies in a hospital bed, recovering from another l attack by the spirits. Maisie's charms, Elderkin's vivid prose and the limited but effective appearances of spirits make the narrative haunting and intriguing in the early going. But in the novel's second half the voices turn increasingly lurid and cartoonish, and Elderkin's tendency to skip back and forth in time muddies the story. The subplots don't help; one involving Crystal's affair with an aborigine falls flat, and another in which the spirits murder a female tourist when she visits a sacred rock is over the top. Elderkin has some success capturing native Australian spirituality in a way that mirrors her use of the Arizona desert for atmosphere in Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, but a bit more balance and restraint might have heightened the effect. (Oct.) Forecast: Fans of the classic novel Walkabout and the recent film Rabbit-Proof Fence both of which showcase the Australian landscape and aboriginal culture may enjoy Elderkin's more fantastical fiction. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Elderkin, whose debut (the award-winning Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, 2000) painted a lyric picture of the Arizona desert, now delves into the mysteries of the Australian outback. The story concerns a young man who hears voices that derive either from his schizophrenia or from his special relationship with the Aboriginal spirits that inhabit the landscape. At the start, Billy wakes up in a hospital bed, having attacked an American tourist on a train after being found wandering along the tracks. The doctors assigned to his case consider insanity his defense against assault charges. His Aboriginal nurse Cecily, however, lets him know in subtle ways that she believes other forces caused his wandering and the strange mutilation of his privates (if it is mutilation, not primitive improvement to his manhood). Elderkin intercuts Billy's recovery process with his buried memories of a childhood spent with his distant mother and pitiful father in an isolated community being dragged into the modern world by an unscrupulous developer. She also offers the perspective of forces of nature--like the wind--as if they were actual characters that watch over Billy (unless they're merely voices in this head). In particular, there is the Aboriginal girl--or spirit of a girl--Maisie, who draws the young Billy into her world. Shortly after the boy Billy discovers that his mother is having an affair, he takes Maisie for a joyride in one of his father's cars and runs into a kangaroo. Distraught, he leaves the outback, becomes a miner, and finds himself platonically involved with a young mother of three. But the forces of nature, which Billy perceives as voices, follow him and draw him back to the land, where he undergoes a transformation--or nervous breakdown. If this all sounds confusing, it is. Tottering between spiritual gobbledygook and psychobabble, Elderkin nevertheless does create lush exotic worlds, although an unfortunate undercurrent of polemic weakens the mystery of what has happened to Billy. Lots to chew on, but hard to digest. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The spirit voices of Australia struggle to be heard, but in a world of money and grog, nobody does hear them. In the harsh and unforgiving outback, Maisie, a mysterious aboriginal girl, befriends teenage Billy, thinking she can make him listen. Ten years later, Billy is in a hospital bed, recovering from horrible wounds received under somewhat mysterious circumstances, wounds that are meaningful to those who know how to interpret them. The story jumps between Billy's youth and his convalescence, telling the story of a boy who questions the world and of magic slipping away out of our grasp. The old omens just don't have the power they used to, and the spirits are tiring of coming up with new ways to communicate when they just get ignored, anyway. Billy, it turns out, constitutes sort of a last-ditch effort; if the spirits fail with him, they threaten that they will depart for good. --Regina Schroeder Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Elderkin must be good: she was picked by Granta as one of its Best Young British Writers Under 40 in 2003 and by Orange Futures as one of 21 Young Women Authors To Watch. Here, an Australian boy's fascination with Aborigine culture proves his undoing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.