Book Review: Oyster, 1996
Oyster, 1996
By Janette Turner Hospital
Published by W. W. Norton & Company
Lately, I've begun to buy books based on their covers. I know I shouldn't do that -- both my English degree and personal philosophy say so. However, at used book sales where every book is under $2 and I have less-book-inclined companions waiting for me to hurry the fuck up and buy my ton of books, judging a book by its cover is a survival strategy. This strategy has so far proven relatively effective, and the latest piece of evidence, Oyster, supports the trend.
I picked up Oyster at the used book sale in Estes Park a few years ago because it looked cool. I barely looked at the brief sales pitch on the back, but the phrases "sexually compelling," "ghostly cataclysm," and "cult messiah" clinched my interest in this simple-looking yet ultimately complex book. It sat on my shelf for a couple years and trekked with me over two moves and two apartments. I finally decided to start reading it soon after the spring semester ended and I found myself with nothing interesting to read. It took me a full two months to complete (I was doubling up with some poetry and a lot of current events and feminist reading), but every minute I spent on it was worth it.
The tiny town of Outer Maroo, unmarked on the Australian Outback's map, finds itself host to a stream of unwanted, undesirable outsiders who are part of Oyster's opal-mining cult. Oyster narrates the weeks prior to this town's apocalypse, effected by the stunning, frightening, and seductive Oyster himself, via the voices of Jess, a waitress at the only bar in town, and Mercy, the teenaged daughter of a family of black sheep. Each speaker relates her version of the story of Outer Maroo in its end times, the story of Oyster and his hot-breathed preaching, the story of opal mining and God, and the story of living in seclusion on the Outback. What comes of these stories is a glittering, languorous, surprisingly intricate web of questions, myths, lies, and silences.
The narrative structure of this novel is atypical, to say the least. The reader often must rely on context clues to figure out whose perspective is guiding each new section, and because so much of the narrative is almost stream-of-consciousness, it's not even close to linear. But the way this novel befuddles its readers with time-changing and narrator-switching adds to the overall sense of floating confusion that characterizes this novel and its cast. Outer Maroo is not ordinary, and Oyster is not ordinary, and Mercy, Jess, and Ms. Rover are not ordinary -- why should the narrative structure be ordinary?
Reading this novel felt like I was mining for Oyster. He is the central mystery figure of this novel, but he speaks only by way of the memories (faulty) of the Outer Maroo townspeople, and then only in Biblical epithets, so learning about him is an exercise in deduction and approximation. The novel begins off-center, it seems, focusing on the drought and the town and some of the more minor characters' relationships, and it is only in the last 100 pages (of this 400-page text) that we learn anything remotely firsthand about Oyster. The first three-quarters of the book are tunnels and offshoots of memories, philosophies, and images that get at Oyster and his messianic presence in the Outback but don't quite define him. And even the last quarter of the novel doesn't define him, it just explains more of what happened on Oyster's Reef that left hundreds of cult members dead or disappeared and Outer Maroo burning on the horizon. From the first sentence to the last, Hospital's novel is true to its opal-mining and pearl-creating themes.
Oyster is a beautiful, sensual book. Strange as it sounds, I often felt like I was eating and drinking the sentences as I read them -- Hospital crafts each sentence with care and attention to the way words feel in her characters' mouths and brains:
Into the heavy silence, the clock on the mantel chimes. Mercy can feel the weight of her father's inability to pray pressing down on the dining room. The word for his face, she thinks, is ravaged. She tastes the consonants carefully: ravaged. They carry within themselves the sound of storms, the exhaustion of storms weathered. Yes, it is a good word, the right word. In a mysterious way, the exact word can slightly and momentarily ease her anxiety. (115)
Every word in this novel is carefully chosen and placed, and it makes me trust Hospital as she guides me through the unstable, volatile world of Outer Maroo in the time of Oyster.
My point is that this is a really damn good book. It might be confusing, but that's part of the appeal -- it's a whole-brain experience. Besides, it's politically relevant with its exploration of extremist religion and its effects on individuals and communities. Go read it.
I highly recommend this book: A
Excerpts:
"I write because what else is there to do? I write against time. I write against the whim of the fire." (41)
"That is the trouble with complicity. It is so intricate; it is like a gigantic cobweb; it clings; you can never get it off; you can never tell where one thread is going to lead." (44)
"'Words are maps, you'll find out,' Miss Rover said. . . . 'Words are like bushfires,' Miss Rover warned. She was high on something. She was high on having crossed the line. 'You can't stop them. And you can't tell where they'll end up.'" (63-64)
"'Opal is amorphous silica, [Mercy] wrote in her diary, with water trapped inside. The water and the silica diffract the light, and that is why colours chase each other on the skin of the stone. The water in opal is thousands of years old (Miss Rover said millions), so the past is locked inside it the way a meaning is locked in a word." (68)
"Beneath her fingertips, the texture of the gingham tablecloth speaks to Mercy of sorrow. She can feel anguish in the slender rolled hem. Each tiny impeccable stitch against the pad of her thumb has a history. To such labour Mercy's mother now gives herself with passionate concentration, stitching and knitting, stitching and knitting, washing, ironing, cleaning, cooking, as though sufficient attention to detail on the smallest domestic grids might shift alignments elsewhere, might rectify something in the larger scheme of events." (115)
"Since her departure, Miss Rover has taken up permanent residence as a sniper inside Mercy's head. There are other snipers. There are the irreverent and earthy voices of Ma Beresford and Ma's Bill. And the voices of the elders. And others, and others. Mercy is trapped in the crossfire. Also there are the clamouring voices of books, Miss Rover's books and her father's library, what used to be her father's library, two different worlds. Is all this listening so exhausting for everyone, or only for Mercy? She feels like the conductor of an orchestra full of musicians who have run amok; they play discordant instruments; they have set up permanent and competitive rehearsal inside her mind." (116)
"Out here, there can be no illusions: whatever calibrated surveying instruments and theodolites may say, all the tables and taxonomies and charts are flickering wishes, nothing but tapers signifying a desire to impose order on the ungovernable, signifying an undying and touching faith in magical thinking, which is what mapmaking is. Here is Hercules, spooning out the ocean with his shell; and here are the rest of us, dipping into the sloshing wake of random violence, galaxies, deserts, city states, continental plates run aground, world wars, childhood, droughts, nebulae exploding, cups of tea, parents, teachers, surveying instruments and charts, flags, nations evolving and devolving, ancient hatreds, ancient fears, ancient passions ceaselessly renewed, apocalyptic fantasies, millennial dreads, city by-laws, earthquakes, inundations . . . here we are parsing and labelling and taking topographic readings and turning on the radio and looking at our clocks and making love." (140)
"But what is the relationship, Mercy wonders, if the Pointillists are right, between the intrinsic colour of a certain even and the colour it takes on when what you remember is all muddled up, or when thinking about it makes you frightened? . . . If an essay lies in a box somewhere, in an abandoned opal mine, does it ferment?" (200-201)