FICTION
Dusk
Robbie Arnott
Picador, $34.99

In Robbie Arnott’s latest novel, an escaped puma is wreaking carnage on grazing country, killing sheep and shepherds in unsettling numbers. The titular puma stalks the highlands of an unnamed place – dense forest and mountainous country, riven with the “thunder of falling water” – while on the lowlands, vagrants, grifters, drifters and itinerants battle for scant resources in a relatively new settlement.

The graziers have put a bounty on the deadly puma. The desperate and penniless are gathering like flies to a carcass. But Dusk is very much alive and outwitting her trackers. The blood of the dead in the snow is already a part of the landscape’s palimpsest.

Arnott writes the experience of moving through the countryside with an understated devotion. Every dance of light, crag, wind, frond, feather, waterfall is richly observed. And yet the poetry of his sentences is in their fidelity to the truth of the story. His love of the land – always keenly Tasmanian – is the magical stuff of his novels.

Here are the protagonists of Dusk, twins Iris and Floyd, advancing to the highlands: “They travelled up the northern passage, through the golden wattles while their last flowers still brightened the air. All that divine colour might have felt like an omen: heaven leaking between the trees. But once they reached the plateau, the truth of this country was revealed to them. A vast field of rock and tussock grass, tar black and wet brown, broken apart here and there by half-iced tarns and forests of small trees. The only shine in the land came from a few loafs of snow, soft wreckage scattered across the plain. In the distance, white peaks cut into a clear sky.”

The truth of this country is that it’s a liminal space between theft and promise, ancient knowledge and new understanding, the slippage between day and night. Dusk. The “soft wreckage” of the peat country from the hooves of so many cattle is pitted against the need for an alien (to this locale) puma to be annihilated. The hierarchy of beings – human, non-human, native, introduced, natural, pest – is at stake.

Arnott keeps finding unflinching new ways to explore what happens when humans and animals are shaped right up against one other. In his debut novel, Flames, a fisherman and seal take on a giant “Oneblood” tuna with devastating and unforgettable consequences, while a park ranger shapeshifts into a wombat-killing cormorant. In Limberlost, young brothers engage in Hemingway-esque skirmishes with a leatherjacket and a disoriented ram. Arnott is building a body of work that interrogates the devastation that is wrought when we violate the natural laws of reciprocity.

Dusk’s ancient country has witnessed wave after wave of carnage. It is a place of “old beauty haunted by new violence”. Iris and Floyd’s convict parents must do what is needed to survive, making a name for themselves as bad people, killing, stealing, swindling. The Renshaw twins, now 37 years old, have grown up as accomplices to casual violence, put to work and theft by their parents. But they want to do better; they want to fix the wrongs of their forebears.