- Hardcover: 402 pages
- Publisher: Knopf Canada; First Canadian Edition edition (Sep 30 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676970141
- ISBN-13: 978-0676970142
- Shipping Weight: 789 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,845,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
You won't find Outer Maroo on any map, and the people who live there intend to keep it that way. In Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary new novel Oyster, this bleak, drought-stricken town in the Australian outback is home to a scant handful of religious fundamentalists and rowdy, gun-toting opal miners. United by their dislike for taxmen, the government, and "foreigners," the inhabitants have managed to keep their town's underground riches a secret from the world--until the day when a bloody, raving, but "quite strikingly beautiful" man staggers in from the desert and changes everything: "Then Oyster came, and quite soon after, jeeps began to announce themselves in small red clouds. There were campers and squatters, and they kept arriving as the zeros on the calendar got closer; or at any rate that was the connection that Oyster himself made, and the newcomers shared his belief, and so disposed themselves for a certain kind of future, now upon us."
In the weeks to come, the charismatic Oyster draws young drifters to his commune outside town, Oyster's Reef, where they become little more than slave labor in the Reef's opal fields. Seduced by his apocalyptic rhetoric or corrupted by his money, the town enters into a strange complicity with the mysterious guru, and anyone who dares to question the arrangement--including a local schoolteacher--conveniently disappears. Eventually, town and cult alike perish in a bloody firestorm that recalls events in Waco, Texas. Throughout, Turner Hospital expertly evokes the desert's shifting dreamscape, a land of pitiless light and heat where the atmosphere itself conspires to create illusion; narrated by a shifting cast of characters, moving back and forth in time, this eerie, hypnotic book often seems much the same way.
From Publishers Weekly
A rank, festering smell hangs over the desolate Australian Outback town of Outer Maroo, so isolated that it can't be found on any map of Queensland. The smell, which the town's wary inhabitants call Old Fuckatoo, is engendered by the corpses of animals dead in the lingering drought?and something more mysterious and horrible, "the feral stench of hate." Dreadful events, carried out under the mandate of religious fundamentalism, have occurred here , but no one dares to refer to them, or to the charismatic cult leader who called himself Oyster and whose acolytes worked like slaves mining opals and serving Oyster's insatiable sexual appetite. Oyster and his followers disappeared in a wave of violence unleashed by evil Dukke Prophet, a member of the churchgoing community of the Living Will, and ever since, no strangers have been allowed into town to look for their missing loved ones. The Bible-quoting, hypocritically sanctimonious Prophet deposed the Living Will's mild pastor and demanded fire and brimstone in the name of salvation. Prophet, a lecherous rancher named Andrew Godwin and the proprietor of the town's only pub are making millions in illegally traded opals while cowing the town's inhabitants and accumulating massive armaments. Armageddon beckons. Part of the seductive power of Hospital's novels (The Last Magician; Charades) lies in her practice of constructing the plot in a series of interlocking narratives, like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Here, much of the action is filtered through the thoughts of Mercy Givens, the young daughter of the deposed pastor. Mercy's precocious but innocent mind resists the full meaning of the brutal acts that finally engulf the community. She and the others in the beautifully observed cast of characters?a schoolteacher doomed because she tells the truth, the parents of two missing cultists, an Aborigine woman, two of society's outcasts who have tried to forget their pasts?gradually reveal the terror of people held under the iron fist of religious fanaticism. As the chilling truth becomes more clear and as the suspense mounts, Hospital creates her most powerful and dazzling novel to date. In sensuous prose, feverish with the cadences of mystery and doom, sometimes hallucinatory but always meticulously controlled, she spins a story eerie in its timeliness and credibility.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning,
By A Customer
This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)
Oyster is an amazing piece of work. I found it challenged me. I was unable to tear through this book, devouring it from page one. It brings up many issues, cult of personality, religion, xenophobia, and human pain. Outer Maroo is a hostile place, full of secrets and suspicion. Once the town fills up with foreigners and zealots, the pace picks up, but the overall writing remains hypnotic.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A book that deserves taking your time with,
By
This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)
This is a challenging book. One needs to linger over the author's words and allow one's imagination to be strung along willingly. If you fight the temptation to speed read, you will discover the prize of her writing skills and the gift of this story. The story evolves through real life and the remembrances of the characters. At times it feels hallucinogenic, but what wouldn't in 120 degree Australian heat and the outback isolation? The story is very unique. There is no need to describe the plot as it is so well discussed in these other reviews. Indeed, the reviews were helpful enough to guide me through the beginning of the book until I got used to the author's rhythm. Eventually, the pieces begin to fit, and just like the unsuspecting visitor, I discover just what the hell is going on with Oyster.
1.0 out of 5 stars
So boring, I can't believe I finished this book...,
By Bennett's mom (Ft Lauderdale, FL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)
This is one of those books that I started reading, was never gripped, but kept slogging through, figuring it must get better. It never did. The characters were lifeless, had no humanity, were not at all engaging. The story was bleak and not compelling. I read all these reviews that talk about her magificent writing--I never found it.
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