As a crippling drought and mismanagement have left more than a dozen Australian towns and villages without a reliable source of water, the country is beginning to confront a question that strikes at its very identity: Is life in Australia’s vast interior compatible with the age of climate change?
In the outback — a landscape central to Australian lore, far removed in distance and spirit from the coastal metropolises — rivers and lakes are disappearing, amplifying fears that wide swaths of rural territory may eventually have to be abandoned.
This could all be incredibly turgid, like subjecting yourself to some dreadful art installation, but it’s not. The stories are nastily funny – sick jokes – and Etchells is a latter-day Menippean satirist. The biggest influence on his early stories, he notes in an afterword, was Mark E Smith of the band the Fall, whose lyrics were glorious, ferocious rages. “Some persons have accused that these writings are full of narrational gaps and sudden perplexing changes of topic brought abt by my total failure to appreciate that the reader does not share important vital background information which I possess. However it is my intention to continue regardless.” The book is horrible, brilliant, deliberately provoking. At times I wished it was over; now I wish it had never stopped.
The Revisionaries takes place in at least three locales across at least four levels of reality and is composed in at least five typefaces. It is, by turns and often at once, surreal, absurd, horrifying, earnest and satirical. It's written with a playful elegance belied by its first 50 pages, which give the impression of irresponsible self-indulgence — but the rest of the book balloons to absorb that beginning into itself and make it cohere with a very different aesthetic project.
There’s a long tradition of agonistic dinosaur portraiture, great beasts roaring and chomping with a special prehistoric savagery. Their size and the nature of their weaponry has stirred a primal terror in humans ever since they were first discovered. But it’s not just the creatures that cause this. It’s also the way they embody the shock of the Darwinian outlook on life. In Darwin’s Plots (1983), her classic study of evolutionary narrative, Gillian Beer notes that “the unused, or uncontrolled, elements in metaphors such as ‘the struggle for existence’ take on a life of their own” outside the particular scientific claims of Darwin’s theory, and those elements rampage across the pages of popular science writing about dinosaurs.