The Visitors<\/strong><\/em>
Jane Harrison<\/strong>
HarperCollins, $32.99<\/strong><\/p>\n
In January 2020, Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison debuted her play The Visitors<\/em> at the Sydney Festival, unsettling audiences with her fictionalised account of the day, 232 years prior, when the First Fleet dropped its anchor in Warrane (Sydney Cove). The round-table melodrama follows seven elders as they debate the pros and cons of letting \u201cthe aliens\u201d in \u2013 a drama refracted through the colonisers\u2019 language and their ancestral attire, the suit.<\/p>\n Jane Harrison has turned her critically acclaimed play The Visitors into a novel. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Janie Barrett<\/cite><\/p>\n Harrison has now found a home for this momentous story in the special formal strategy of the novel. None of the play\u2019s immediacy, lightness or perturbation has been lost.<\/p>\n Harrison\u2019s use of the third-person present tense gives each of the seven major characters a temporary, albeit erroneous sense of serenity. By representing the immediacy of experience, we are forced to confront history as it might have been \u2013 what if the aliens were not welcomed?<\/p>\n The Visitors by Jane Harrison.<\/span><\/p>\n The question of \u201cwhat if\u201d lies at the heart of every historical fiction, and Harrison does not elude it. Seven men across seven nations hold an emergency meeting in the high summer to determine how they should respond. The number of \u201chuge nowees\u201d (ships) are growing by the hour.<\/p>\n Harrison makes a smooth transition into a literary representation of that fateful day when the visitors arrived. At this moment, they are still \u201conly visitors\u201d.<\/p>\n Just 11 years earlier, Captain James Cook stopped by \u201cGwea\u201d (Botany Bay) but didn\u2019t stay. The first sighting of the fleet this time is seen as \u201ca dark speck on the horizon\u201d. One of the younger characters is jolted by the same anxiety he gets when he \u201csenses an animal while hunting\u201d. \u201cThe speck represents disorder; it is an aberration, a disruption, a schism.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrison\u2019s depiction of speech is striking. Dialogue is written out as in a script (Lawrence: Who are they and why are they here? <\/i>Gary: I\u2019d have to see it. For myself. That\u2019s all) <\/i>and their conversations expand and contract. The men have journeyed for days to gather, and their intuitions have never been tested this way.<\/p>\n Obvious comparisons can be made to Reginald Rose\u2019s 12 Angry Men<\/i>, but I was also struck by the tonal similarities to Miriam Toews\u2019 2018 novel Women Talking<\/i>, where a group of women in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia come together to strategise upon discovering they have been repeatedly raped by the men in their village during their sleep.<\/p>\n Harrison relies on her readers to recognise the psychological and logistical complexities facing the characters. She does this without compromising their common mortality, or individual aspirations. Most of them look upon the speck on the horizon with hostility \u2014 a \u201cghostly apparition\u201d that is \u201ca blot on the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, some express a duty of care to strangers. \u201cUs mob exchange knowledge all the time, why not with them?\u201d asks Walter, the most generous elder. \u201cPerhaps where their knowledge meets ours, something new and unique can be created?\u201d<\/p>\n Post-referendum, this line is heart-shattering to read. Nevertheless, Harrison imbues her new storytelling formula with surprising lightness.<\/p>\n The prose is candid and delicate \u2014 the environment is treated with gentle fervour. This is a land where its people measure time by looking at shadow lengths; where the sky is filled with \u201cclouds dark grey\u201d like \u201ccaterpillars across the expanse\u201d, where lobsters \u201cskulk\u201d and mudflats come \u201calive\u2026with creatures\u201d and ducks \u201cslide through the water, leaving silver arrows in their wake\u201d.<\/p>\n In the end, the initial question \u2013 \u201cHow to repel the aliens?\u201d \u2013 has become obsolete. They have exhausted their talking. The question was never really a question, but a stasis of reckoning with the inevitable.<\/p>\n The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.<\/i><\/b> Get it delivered every Friday<\/i><\/b>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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