The Swan Book suggests that stories, their dissemination and cross-pollination, bear upon the ability of Indigenous Australians to govern their own minds, and by extension their land (these are inextricably linked) – and that this has implications for the future of human life on Earth. She is concerned with the human mind and its capacity to imagine, with the way stories are born from particular locales and yet can spread like viruses, travelling gypsy-like across the planet in the way of migratory birds, taking hold of minds in places they don’t belong. In this surreal prelude, Wright introduces the basic elements of her unlikely love story about a girl’s affair with the northern skies and her quest to regain sovereignty over her own brain. It is ‘nostalgia for foreign things’ and it manufactures dangerous ideas, including a ‘splattering of truths’ about ‘a story about a swan with a bone’. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll’s house. The novel opens with an arresting declaration: It teems with songs, stories, images and fragments of culture from across the planet.
In August 2008, as part of her Oodgeroo Noonuccal Lecture, Wright said: ‘Oodgeroo absolutely understood the power of belief in the fight for sovereignty over this land – that if you could succeed in keeping the basic architecture of how you think, then you owned the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive.’ The Swan Book constructs this architecture of the mind – and, as with a mind, it operates in many dimensions simultaneously. But The Swan Book takes all these – especially the last – to new levels. It bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin her humour and scathing satire her fierce political purpose her genre bending her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic. The Swan Book is Alexis Wright’s third novel and like her first two – Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award winning Carpentaria (2006) – it opens in her ancestral country, the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria. But not for the reasons you might imagine. This is the saddest love story I have ever read.
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