A review by han_reardonsmith
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

5.0

A deeply unsettling read for anyone entangled with the ongoing settler-colonisation of ‘australia’— esp for those, like me, who are of settler-colonial descent. The future-realities laid out by Wright are all too prescient, uncomfortably accurate becomings as read from this point (roughly a decade after it was written); it reminds me of the horror of recognition reading Octavia E Butler’s Parable of the Sower/Talents. While The Swan Book highlights the impacts of foreign colonising worlds and forces on forever-old cultures of the 250+ pre-invasion nations of this land, it also brings the world to a kind of resting place within ‘australia’ in the bodies of swans, an embodiment of at once elegance, poise, composure, awkwardness, desperation and despair, direction, purpose, (divine) guidance, mystery, voicelessness and utterance, gathering masses and individual distinction, good/evil, sweetness, vulnerability, protection, refuge/refugees, displacement, and many more things beyond this scratching the surface. The dichotomy between European and Asian literary references to (white) swans and the red-beak presence of Oblivia’s black swans carries the weight of the relevant-irrelevance of imported cultural values and ideals, stripped of connection to place (such as Big Red’s family’s northern hemisphere christmas-obsessed decorations). My brain is still reeling from the rich complexity of images and references woven into this at once beautiful and unforgiving text, and I think much of this novel will stay with me for a long time indeed as I continue to think-with the histories I am born into, the place in which I still live, and my participation in and complicity with ongoing settler-colonisation, and how I might stand in solidarity and support of anticolonial efforts.