Fiction: Spirit voices, voices in the head, the voice of the wind, small-town voices from the outback - this is the chorus Susan Elderkin has assembled to sing her requiem for Australia's unacknowledged Aboriginal past. But there are other voices that intrude here as well, those of the writers who have influenced Elderkin's style and treatment of her subject-matter, and who dilute the book's originality and sense of authenticity, writes Giles Newington.
You have to credit her ambition, though: as in her previous book, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, she wanders far from familiar territory (London, the University of East Anglia creative writing course, a place on the Granta list of Best British Novelists Under 40) and stakes out her imaginative territory in a desert on the other side of the world. Her immersion in the detail of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, especially of its language and nature, is impressive, bringing to mind E. Annie Proulx's extensive investigation of Newfoundland in The Shipping News. Proulx is one obvious influence; but also, less helpfully, there are echoes here of the whole over-used magic-realist box of tricks and of the historical ghosts summoned up in black American fiction by writers such as Toni Morrison. The problem with such similarities is not just that they invite comparisons, but mainly that they interfere with Elderkin's own voice and make it seem contrived.
Partly because of the stylistic complications, the story of The Voices takes a long time to unfold. In the meantime, the interplay between plain talk and spirit lyricism, between blunt and frothy, leaves things teetering too often on the edge of twee. Different perspectives begin to clog the narrative, and shifting time frames leave themes undeveloped and questions unanswered for too long. By the end, it is difficult (for this reviewer, anyway) to be sure why the hero, Billy Saint, has been "sung up" by the spirit of an Aboriginal girl, why he has been punished by "the voices", and why he has been selected for initiation into the culture through a process of double circumcision which makes his "wango swell up sideways at the top". Billy's symbolic role as a link between the tragic but spiritual past and the indifferent but bereft present is not sufficiently explained, and because of this, the story does not really progress.
The form is an irritant because one senses a more straightforward and realistic novel lurking here that would be more interesting. The closely observed scenes between the male characters in the local bar and down the mine, and between Billy's mother and her competing lovers, have a directness and authenticity that the over-dressed spirit scenes lack.
Elderkin, in this novel at least, is speaking in too many tongues.
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalistFiction
The Voices. By Susan Elderkin, Fourth Estate, 323pp, £16.99