“The spots on its pelt shone against the wood like a patterned moth, a living quilt”

Limberlost is the third novel by award-winning Australian author, Robbie Arnott. It begins in the mid-twentieth Century in rural Tasmania. At fifteen, Ned West is wary of horses, but when his older sister berates him and his father for their neglect, in her absence, of her favourite mare, all Ned wants to do is make it right.

His quiet, selfless solution unwittingly advances his progress to his fervent dream of buying a small boat, but that silver lining also has a cloud: his father’s hard-won approval is tempered by the revelation of a thoughtless act, the accidental trapping of a spotted quoll, something about which Ned feels confused and guilty.

Throughout his adult life, through work, marriage, fatherhood and into old age, significant, sometimes poignant, moments in his youth, in particular that fifteen-year-old summer, spring back into his thoughts, often jogged by the most unlikely of gestures, words or incidents.

In between waiting for word of his older brothers, absent fighting a war, and helping his father in their apple orchard, Ned’s summer school vacation was filled with trapping rabbits for pelts, fishing with his chatty friend, Jackbird, noticing Jackbird’s younger sister, Callie, and carefully nursing the caught wild creature back to health.

And unexpectedly, he found himself restoring an old dinghy to sail-worthy condition, enchanted by the wood from which it was constructed: “The odours of trees belonged to their leaves and flowers; he’d assumed timber would be mute. He wondered at his wrongness, as the wood spice filled his lungs, sank into his blood.” As he sailed the river, he imagined impressing his brothers with his skill and confidence when (if) they returned from the war.

The West family aren’t talkers: dialogue between Ned and his father, his sister and, in flashbacks, his brothers, is spare; much is implied; yet grief, financial stress, pride, disappointment are all succinctly conveyed. Ned frequently recalls his father’s pragmatic solution to his own five-year-old fear of a supposedly mad whale: “’If you’re going to fear something, boys, it’s best to understand it.’ He laid a hand on Ned’s scalp, his rough skin stilling Ned’s shivers. ‘To come right up against it.’”

It’s easy to be drawn to Arnott’s protagonist, to care about his fate: Ned West is pensive, reserved, tentative, but filled with good intentions, and completely devoid of any arrogance or guile: “These pulses of pride never lasted long. Ned wasn’t shaped to be impressed by himself”. This unassuming young man believes himself unnoticed, but his hard work and respectful attitude are not unobserved by family, friends and neighbours. The final pages can’t fail to bring a lump to the throat.

Arnott’s descriptive prose is so exquisitely beautiful, it’s hard to limit the quotes, be it just a few words: “his brothers’ faraway war-shadows” or a sentence “Falmouth kept looking at them. Stiff hair matted his scalp and fuzzed over his chin. Ned wondered if something within the man was broken or jarred. He was a loose sketch— unfinished, or in parts smudged out”.

“He was working in a logging crew to fell a large copse of manna gums— ancient hardwoods ghostly in colour and immense in height, some rising a hundred yards into the air to flail their leaves against the sky’s cheek. Aromatic, bloodlike sap ran from the wounds the men hacked into their trunks.”

And finally, “He’d likely never see the boat again, either. If he wanted to explain its uncommon beauty and the effect it had on people, including himself, especially himself, he would have to use the blunt tool of description— could not show it to anyone, and allow it to speak for itself. He didn’t even have a photograph”: Arnott’s is never a “blunt tool”. Once again, Robbie Arnott does not disappoint.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Text Publishing.