Laura's Review - Remembering Babylon

Set in mid-19th century colonial Australia, Remembering Babylon explores issues of race and class through a young man named Gemmy Fairley. Gemmy turns up in a Queensland village, seemingly out of nowhere. He is white, but "appears" black and speaks the language of native people. He is most comfortable communicating with the three children who first discovered him, members of the McIvor family. Through various means of communication, Gemmy shares his background as a ragamuffin boy tossed from a ship, who lived with aboriginal people for 16 years. The McIvor family take him in, providing for his basic needs and giving him work to do around their property. Gemmy baffles the community:

He had started out white. No question. When he fell in with the blacks -- at thirteen, was it? -- he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white?

They looked at their children, even the smallest of them chattering away, entirely at home in their tongue, then heard the mere half-dozen words of English this fellow could cough up, and even those so mismanaged and distorted you could barely guess what he was on about, and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It.

For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then? (p.40)

But Remembering Babylon isn't so much Gemmy's story as everyone else's. Janet, Meg, and Lachlan are forever changed after finding Gemmy. Several settlers actively work to oust Gemmy, showing their true selves and straining Jock and Ellen McIvor's relations with them. And just beyond the hubbub lives Mrs. Hutchence, an eccentric woman who offers love and kindness to everyone she meets. Malouf introduced every type of character imaginable: angry, bigoted settlers, a young schoolmaster, a preacher nearing the end of his career, etc. Most were not as well-developed as the McIvor family, and after a while I found the frequent new faces a distraction. The ending was also strange, jumping ahead in time while leaving a number of loose ends back in the 19th century. Still, this was a worthwhile read, an interesting study of human nature, set in a historic period I enjoy reading about.




Cross-posted from my blog