Lost in the Wilderness

By John Skow

Travelers who drive far enough into the parched interior of Australia, taking care to lug extra fuel, water and minor spare parts, enter a region of outback so distant and featureless that it lies beyond the reassuring certitude of maps. So says Australian novelist Janette Turner Hospital at the outset of her grim, millennial novel Oyster (Norton; 400 pages; $25.95). Such travelers--an Australian father, say, and an American stepmother, joining forces to track down backpacking adult children who had disappeared months before--would soon become disoriented. Even in their car they would be dazed by heat and a pervading stench from the reeking carcasses of drought-killed cattle and sheep and the burned hulks of stranded vehicles.

They would have the name of a town, Outer Maroo, but not its location, scrawled months ago on a postcard as a possible next stop. With cruelly bad luck they might find the place. The author describes an outpost of paranoia and fear festering with something more virulent than countrymen's traditional loathing for outsiders and government bureaucrats. Rumored large discoveries of opals in the surrounding geologic strata don't really explain matters because opal mining has scuffled along here for decades. Except for tankerloads of beer and gasoline, contact with the rest of Australia is largely cut off. Mail to the outside is stamped, sorted and bagged, but not sent out. A schoolteacher who arrives from Brisbane to instruct the settlement's children is judged to be dangerous and is, as smirking locals say, "transferred." Nothing more is heard from her.

Most of the story is told by a bright, troubled girl named Mercy, daughter of a preacher whose church has been taken over by religious zealots. "If rain had come, things might have turned out differently," she says. "That is what I think now. But there were children in Outer Maroo who had never seen rain." Into this withered rangeland came a drifter who dressed in white and called himself Oyster, a random alias he had adopted while working with an aquaculture firm. In his new manifestation he was a religious con man, a charismatic spellbinder who had learned the trick of looking for long seconds into a listener's eyes while reciting apocalyptic prophecy in tones of sexual love. And he had opals, three very large specimens to which, he said, faith had led him (though it appears later that he had murdered the man who found them).

Mercy knows only part of what then happened, and most of her memories are too terrible for her to face directly. So the reader, like the parents who have found their way to Outer Maroo, is disoriented for much of the novel, menaced by half-understood threats, never sure what ground is solid. The horror here is peeked at slantwise, through a girl's splayed fingers. What appears to be true is that Oyster bound dozens of young believers into a cult whose elements included an underground life of opal mining, ecstatic prayer and patriarchal sex. And that in the end Oyster gratified his inflamed ego with mass suicide. The author's story, of course, is a rough match with remembered headlines--of Waco, of Heaven's Gate and the rest. But the mad Oyster, dead before the narrative begins, and the hate-filled mining town, dead as the last page turns, have their own bitter, brilliant reality in this impressive novel.

--By John Skow