Reflections on The Swan Book

Alexis Wright's The Swan Book is not an easy read. It wouldn't suit the content if it were.
The novel takes place in a future Australia, suffering the effects of a global dystopia ravaged by climate change and land-war. This future Australia has backslid from any hope of progress - Aboriginal people from all over the country are taken to live in an army-patrolled camp, homeless crowd the flooded streets of cities, and wildlife are in a forced migration to escape dusty drought or freezing climates. Everyone but a privileged few are starving and displaced.

This dystopia is shown to us through the perspective of Oblivia, a girl who has been unable to speak since she was gang-raped as a child and later found comatose in a hollow tree. Her muteness is born of trauma, but partly a conscious choice: 'She would rather be silent since the last word she had spoken when scared out of her wits, the day when her tongue had screeched to a halt with dust flying everywhere, and was left screaming Ahhhhh! throughout the bushland, when she fell down the hollow of the tree.' (The Swan Book, p.19)
Something I thought fascinating was Alexis Wright's insight at MWF on Oblivia's muteness: 'The story of Oblivia is not just one character... it is Aboriginal people generally. People are closing off.'
Oblivia's story, anger-inspiring as it is, is an incredibly fitting analogy for the issue of ancestral land ownership. Where one story is the invasion of the body, the other is the invasion of land; of home.

The Swan Book is also filled with touches of the surreal: genie bodyguards, talking monkeys, ghosts, and personifications of drought. It is never made clear whether the more fantastical elements are real in this dark future world, or products of Oblivia's mind, resulting from the 'cut-snake virus' in her brain. But hers is an apt lens to examine this future Australia through. Her confusing, fractured and chaotic narrative perspective mirrors a world that has become the same.

'Gang-raped. The girl hardly knew what these two words meant as she thought about herself in the sameness of passing time while sitting on the floor of the hull, pulling her head apart trying to remember what had happened to her, or perhaps whatever it was, it just happened to some other little girl that everyone was talking about and maybe it was not her either, or herself neither, but all girls.' (p.82)