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Robbie Arnott’s third novel is about love,the fear of loss,and about joy.Credit:Peter Mathew

His mother is a myth to Ned,their connection existing only through books,including Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost,which gives this novel – and the family orchard – its name. Meanwhile,Ned idolises his missing brothers. He can’t “ride like Bill” or “dash and smile” like Toby. He displaces his fear of their loss with “dreams of trapping,of hunting” and,more particularly,of saving enough money to buy a boat. When he achieves this goal,he purchases from a man whose son died at war in the Pacific. Ned can’t look him in the face. The man’s grief is too close to his own fear.

As he later wants to look after his wife and daughters,Ned wants to look after his sister Maggie. I would have liked more information about Maggie. Why has she left her teaching course? Because her father can’t afford the fees? Is she needed in the orchard with her brothers away? But this is a minor quibble. As we see things from Ned’s point of view,he doesn’t know the answers.

He is not “much of a storyteller”. Fearing he can only share experience through “the blunt tool of description”,he has trouble converting “experience into meaningful language”. He regularly rationalises:where a rabbit’s death is painful,he reminds himself that it is “feral”;when he doesn’t understand his father,he finds “an excuse to be furious” about finding no duck eggs. He says little.

But Ned is fully immersed in experiencing his world. And the author’s own language is never blunt;Arnott evokes the life of “quiet,fumble-mouthed” Ned with his own enchanting words.

For instance,boundaries between the animate and the inanimate slip with his description of horses as “huge,storm-mouthed” creatures,part of a pattern of images about mouths:rabbit traps have “iron fangs”;shipmasters find the “teeth” of reefs;saws have “sap-bloodied fangs”.

In Arnott’s world,the rudder of Ned’s boat has to “talk” to the sail,or at least “listen” to it. So,although Ned wouldn’t use such word himself,we believe that he sees a trader as made of “lint,capillaries and vapour”,that he hears “the bush’s orchestra of terror”.

Through this language,Arnott shows us Tasmanian trees that a quoll can survive in,the watery home of leatherjackets and abalone. His England is a “fairytale” place of “a deep,storybook green” that Ned visits to investigate a new pesticide. Because this is a fairytale world,we want to tell Ned not to trust what he’s given there,or at least to pay attention to warnings. With the novel named in honour of another environment-minded writer,it’s no real surprise that the deadliest thing in the novel is far smaller than a whale.

This is a novel about the deepest of emotions,about love,the fear of loss,and about joy. The scent of his boat’s timber puts Ned “under a spell he … never truly recovered from,like a wish come true”. On Ned’s honeymoon,the majestic river “runs and breaks”,falling “to splash the boots of the gazing newlyweds”. In Ned’s happiness,nature exists to serve his gaze,just as his dream wasn’t so much to own a boat as to have his brothers see him out on it.

Whether or not Ned returns to the place where he saw the whale,he needs to realise he’s not simply Bill and Toby’s “warless little brother”. Arnott shows that the fantastic can be an element we create in our own lives,sometimes to bear the otherwise unbearable. We are with Ned as he learns that life’s real magic is in the love he finds within his family.

Any readers unresponsive to the magical realism of Arnott’s previous novels should find something to appreciate here,and people who already value his writing will have the opportunity to see him working his lyrical magic in a more familiar but equally beguiling world.

Kimberley Starr’s most recent novel,Torched,is published by Pantera Press.

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