Oyster [Paperback]

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.

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.

This novel tells a tale fit for the millennium. In a part of the Australian Outback so remote it is literally off the charts, a tiny opal-mining and ranching community faces the end of its world. A place of closed minds and closely held secrets, Outer Maroo has become dangerous since the arrival and departure of the fascinating, sinister spiritual leader calling himself Oyster. Since Oyster's coming, certain areas of conversation are taboo, minds are unhinged, and reality seems hard to define. Outsiders are met with distrust, dislike, and worse, while a seemingly endless drought heightens tension unbearably. When two particularly stubborn strangers demand information about their lost children, disciples of Oyster, they initiate Armageddon for Outer Maroo. Related from multiple perspectives and shifting back and forth in time, the narrative maintains the pace and suspense of a technothriller, yet its principal strengths lie in mood and characters depicted in exquisite prose. Hospital (The Last Magician, LJ 9/15/92) deserves a wide readership for this book.
-?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hospital's demanding, densely layered, symphonic novels have never received the attention they deserve--a bit too ornate to achieve commercial success or win high-profile awards. This latest effort doesn't quite match The Last Magician (1992), Hospital's magnum opus, but it's a triumph all the same, and with a story line that draws on plays to millennial fever, it may reach a larger audience. Outer Maroo is so far into the Australian outback, it doesn't appear on any maps, which is just fine as far as the government-hating opal miners and God-fearing holy rollers who live there are concerned. Then a charlatan called Oyster arrives and establishes a cult on a distant reef, attracting the usual spiritually adrift young people, winning over the holy rollers with talk of apocalypse, and drawing the miners into his fold by offering them what they crave--the fieriest opals this side of Hell. A few holdouts, mavericks who see the evil in Oyster's eyes and aren't hypnotized by the opal's fire, attempt to resist, but most fall into "the seductive drift of helplessness." Matters come to a head when two parents, searching for their disappeared children, make their way to Outer Maroo and unwittingly instigate the final slouch toward Armaggedon. Hospital writes of the lure of cults not with the outraged eyes of a moralist but with an artist's sensitivity to mood and character. We feel Oyster's power in the "bent air" of Outer Maroo, and we smell the "feral stench of hatred" as the conspirators stalk the outsiders. A genuinely hypnotic novel. Bill Ott

Echoes of Waco, Heaven's Gate, and Jonestown combine with intimations of apocalypse in a stunningly evocative story of life in a remote Australian hell-hole--a place where evil is as pervasive as the heat, goodness as rare as rain. Australian writer Hospital (The Last Magician, 19??, etc.) sets her morality tale in Outer Maroo, a town in a hot, arid region where droughts are common and a sinister, moistureless fog often covers the land. It's a place so remote that it's not even on the maps, yet its soil is riven with opal seams. These opals, and the isolation, attract folks ``who are always waiting for retribution to catch up with them''--including the charismatic Oyster, who founds a commune (Oyster's Reef) just outside of town. Gradually, he begins to attract idealistic young people; they come as disciples, but soon find themselves digging for opals and catering to Oyster's increasingly bizarre needs. A chorus of voices recalls his lethal effect on Outer Maroo--how he corrupted many of the locals, offering them wealth and freedom from a government they viewed as intrusive, and how a teacher was among those brutally murdered for opposing him. Oyster's reign ended, appropriately, in an apocalyptic fire in which he and most of his followers perished. Only the good--Mercy, a young girl Oyster raped; Ethel, a local Aborigine; Jess, a former surveyor; Major Miner, a veteran and former POW; plus Nick and Sarah, two ``foreigners'' searching for their lost children--survive. These are the people who now recollect the corruption and destruction of Outer Maroo and their discovery of a kind of redemption after Oyster's end--and a chance to build a shining city of faith. A deep and harrowing journey through a desolate land into the recesses of the soul and then back into the light, all recorded in luminous prose. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"A precarious, sensuous masterpiece [that] draws us into a savage world [as] shimmering as the fabulous opals of the doomed reef." -Editors' Choice, The Globe and Mail

"Exquisitely told by an extraordinary writer.... Breathtaking, resonant, seductive.... A provocative metaphor for our planet at the end of the millennium." -Books in Canada

"A world both searing and and voluptuous, dark and light, harsh and merciful ... Oyster is her most ambitious -- and seamless -- novel to date. Brilliant." -Quill & Quire

"A triumphant novel." -The Montreal Gazette

"Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength -- ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story -- throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism." -Fay Weldon

Outer Maroo, Australia. Population 87. Here two opposing cultures - the fiercely individualistic bush folk and the church-going fundamentalists - used to co-exist peaceably. Until valuable opal reefs are discovered and lust, greed, and bigotry sweep through the dusty uncharted town.

"Oyster" has been chosen by "Publisher's Weekly" as one of their Best Books of the Year for 1998.

"A precarious, sensuous masterpiece [that] draws us into a savage world [as] shimmering as the fabulous opals of the doomed reef." -Editors' Choice, The Globe and Mail

"Exquisitely told by an extraordinary writer.... Breathtaking, resonant, seductive.... A provocative metaphor for our planet at the end of the millennium." -Books in Canada

"A world both searing and and voluptuous, dark and light, harsh and merciful ... Oyster is her most ambitious -- and seamless -- novel to date. Brilliant." -Quill & Quire

"A triumphant novel." -The Montreal Gazette

"Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength -- ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story -- throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism." -Fay Weldon

Janette Turner Hospital, one of Canada's most internationally praised writers, grew up in Australia. She moved to Canada in 1971. Her previous novels include Charades, The Ivory Swing, The Tiger in the Tiger Pit and The Last Magician. She lives in Ontario.