Julia Leigh’s debut novel is a mesmerizing tale of survival set in the
wilds of Tasmania. It is a story told with economy and precision, yet one
which abounds with a sense of intrigue that has the reader quickly turning
the pages to find out what happens next. M, posing as “Martin David,
Naturalist,” has gone in search of what may be the last remaining
thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, an animal long thought to be extinct. M’s
assignment is to find the tiger and harvest its genetic material for
biotechnical research. He has no intention, however, of bringing it back
alive.
Before embarking on the hunt, M establishes a base camp at the home of
Lucy Armstrong and her family. Lucy has kept to her bed in the months
since her husband, a naturalist, disappeared on the plateau. No trace of
his body was ever found. Depressed and addicted to tranquilizers, she
relies upon sleep to heal her wounds. Meanwhile, her two precocious
children, Bike and Sassafras, manage the affairs of the house.
M’s initial forays on the plateau achieve little success. He sets traps
and snares, but only captures the ravenous Tasmanian devils that roam the
plateau at night. Is the tiger a mere figment of the imagination or a
creature that, through keen yet primitive instinct, has managed to elude
man and the technology that has encroached upon its environment? M
increases the length of his expeditions as he becomes more attuned to his
surroundings and the habits of his quarry, patiently awaiting a sign that
will confirm the tiger’s existence. It is not long before the hunt becomes
a full-blown obsession.
Quite unexpectedly, M, a man “anchored by neither wife nor home, nor by a
lover nor even a single friend,” becomes attached to the children during
those intervals he spends at the house preparing for his next excursion.
At first distant but then more at ease with himself and his hosts, M
gradually relinquishes those defenses that make him an expert hunter. His
presence instills a new life into the bluestone house. Lucy soon rouses
from her slumber and M, seeing her for the first time as a woman, begins
to entertain the idea of what it would be like to live there permanently.
This broken family, impoverished and living at the fringe of society,
gives him cause to reflect upon his own childhood and the traumas he
suffered. M yearns to belong and to be needed by others, yet he remains a
solitary man. The author delicately raises the question of whether M can
reconcile his past with the present. By alternating scenes of warm
domesticity with the often harsh conditions M experiences on the plateau,
Leigh heightens the conflict within her protagonist and outlines, in even
greater relief, the emotional and physical isolation her characters must
endure.
Once M steps into the bush, he transforms himself into “the natural man,
the man who can see and hear and smell what other men cannot; the man of
delicate touch and sinuous movement; the man who can find his way through
the bush by day and night, and sit motionless through the long hours with
his finger married to the trigger.” The alienation and ambivalence he once
felt sloughs off of him like a second skin. There is no doubt that M will
be ready when the tiger appears. His mind is a machine, a storehouse for
facts that will lead him to his prey. “Luck is for the unlucky,” M tells
himself, “for those who lack precision.”
M is not, however, without sympathy for the tiger. But is this sympathy
enough to prevent him from fulfilling his assignment and rendering the
animal extinct? In spare prose that reduces each action and gesture to its
essential meaning, Leigh creates a final hunt scene in which M’s pursuit
of the tiger acquires an oblique, existential quality, one which further
delineates the boundaries of free will and the laws which ensure survival.
As M’s search for the tiger progresses, he reverts to an earlier state of
human existence, becoming one with the elements, trusting only his senses
to guide him. M is an enigma, a cipher. In many ways he knows the tiger
better than he knows himself. In the novel’s exciting conclusion, we
follow the hunter and the hunted as they approach the “impassable,
unimaginable gulf between life and death.”
Reviewed by David Remy
