"Limberlost" by Robbie Arnott

An audio book.

Tazmania. Ned was 5, living in Limberlost, when his mother died. Only his sister Maggie, the eldest of the 4 siblings, remember her. When it's rumoured that a mad whale had been attacking boats at the river mouth at dusk, his father takes him and his brothers there, showing them the reef that drunk sailors used as an excuse. A huge whale surfaces by the boat. Ned would never forget its huge eye. 10 years later, his brothers at war, he's catching/shooting rabbits, selling their pelt to the army, saving up to buy a boat. He accidentally traps a Qual (a wild cat). He cares for it, keeping it secret from all but Callie, his friend's tomboy sister. He buys a boat, mends it, takes Callie on it.

When the cat's ready to be released, he and Callie take it on the boat to a forest. When he finishes the boat, people visit to admire it. There are hints that the farm is in financial trouble. He gets an offer for the boat. He take it one last towards the river mouth but the weather's bad. He sells it. Callie finds it wrecked by the road - there'd been an accident after it was collected. He visits it, overwhelmed by sadness - his cat gone, his boat gone, his brothers gone. He reads his mother's favourite novel, the one that she called the orchard after. He wonders whether the grief about the boat will ever turn to happy memories. At the end of summer his oldest brother returns. Looking back after a lifetime, it will seem his life's most overwhelming moment, surpassing even the moment when his wife died.

He marries an unnamed wife (Callie). They live on a farm - he knows about orchards, she about the rest. He travels to the Lake District (UK) as a rep of the orchard collective (!) to learn about a new spray. He sails on Lake Windermere. His mother loved the lakes - "was he drifting on a mirror that once held her reflection? The spray helps make the farm a success but there's a hint that it causes his wife's later cancer when his girls are little. He visits his 2 elder girls when they're at university. They ask if he had ever thought of returning his land to its real owners. He wants to tell them about the boat, the river. He means to tell them the cancer has returned. The orchards of the area have been converted to vineyards. He has grandchildren. At his 90th birthday he feels profoundly loved, profoundly alone.

The order of events presented above is little like the order in the book. In the first section we get a summary of his first 20 years. In the final paragraph we're told that his wife died, that he lived beyond 90. The book starts slowly, the key symbols gradually accumulating significance - especially given that there are no death scenes. He returns to the episode of the wild cat throughout his life, telling his young children about it. He's caring and considerate. That summer he cared for the cat and the boat. He befriended his wife-to-be. He learned how to love and lose. By the end, the book's moving, though the UK trip seems odd.

Other reviews

• Imogen Dewey (Arnott’s writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental, capturing its out-of-kilter ferocity: a place of beauty but not peace ... Arnott, I think, isn’t sentimental. Ned’s failures and errors aren’t presented as moments of transformation or growth. They are allowed simply to stand, as part of the whole.)
• Melissa Harrison (Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.” That is, by any measure, a gorgeous paragraph ... It’s a lovely read for anyone who enjoys descriptive writing, but would be more compelling with some tightening up of the nuts and bolts of storytelling: plot, pace and point of view. We’re told Ned really wants a boat, and this goal is what the first third of the book moves us towards, but we never really feel his need or fully understand why it takes this form. An inciting incident in which his father takes all three boys to see a supposedly mad whale lingers in Ned’s memory, but its meaning remains confused even as more details emerge ... When Ned falls in love, his partner remains unnamed until close to the novel’s end; it’s a gamble that doesn’t pay off, rendering an already rather sketched-in female character even less real without adding any much-needed narrative propulsion. ... Many of the details of a trip to the English Lake District, populated by flat-capped “West Anglians” and their collies, are likely to make British readers wince. Limberlost is told in a closeup third person; this allows for limited departure from the main character’s experience – usually for scene setting – but here isn’t handled consistently enough. Episodes are described in vivid detail that Ned doesn’t witness)