The Voices Book

A story of incantatory beauty set in the wilds of Australia, Susan Elderkin's second novel The Voices has earned her the distinction from Granta as one of the Best Young British Writers Under 40. In the remote, blood red dust of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint turns to the stark landscape and mesmerizing spirits of the native Aborigines for the companionship he lacks at home. When he is befriended by Maisie, an enigmatic Aboriginal girl who has "sung him up," he slowly comes to realize that 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.

Publishers Weekly

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. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.