The Bell of the World
Gregory Day
The Bell of the World
Gregory Day
When a troubled Sarah Hutchinson returns to Australia from boarding school in England and time spent in Europe, she is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Ferny on the family property, Ngangahook. With the sound of the ocean surrounding everything they do on the farm, Sarah and her uncle form an inspired bond hosting visiting field naturalists and holding soirees in which Sarah performs on a piano whose sound she has altered with items and objects from the bush and shore.
As Sarah's world is nourished by music and poetry, Ferny's life is marked by Such is Life, a book he has read and reread, so much so that the volume is falling apart. Its saviour is Jones the Bookbinder of Moolap, who performs a miraculous act. To shock and surprise, Jones interleaves Ferny's volume with a book he bought from an American sailor, a once obscure tale of whales and the sea. In art as in life nature seems supreme. Ngangahook and its environs are threatened, however, when members of the community ask the Hutchinsons to help 'make a savage landscape sacred' by financing the installation of a town bell. The fearless musician and her idealistic uncle refuse to buckle to local pressures, mounting their own defence of 'the bell of the world'.
Gregory Day's new novel embodies a cultural reckoning in a breathtakingly beautiful and lyrical way. The Bell of the World is both a song to the natural wonders that are not yet gone and a luminous prehistory of contemporary climate change and its connection to colonialism. It is a book immersed in the early to mid-twentieth century but written very much for the hearts of the future.
'The Bell of the World is regionalist and universal, historical and timeless, beautiful and brutal. It is an urgent call for us not to speak but to listen, so that we might find our place, both here in Australia and on the Earth.' -Maria Takolander
Review
Mark Rubbo
When I started this book, I was reminded of my initial reaction to Peter Carey’s Illywhacker, still my favourite of his works – both are big and ambitious and suspend reality. There the similarity ends. This book brims with characters eccentric and fabulous who will stay with you long after you’ve finished.
Young Sarah Hutchinson is sent by her estranged parents to live with her eccentric uncle Ferny, an enthusiastic polymath, on his farm somewhere near Aireys Inlet on Victoria’s surf coast. It’s the early 1900s and Sarah, an aesthete and musician, is entranced by her uncle Ferny and his bohemian ways – her banishment is no punishment at all.
Together they encourage each other and share lovers. Ferny organises musical soirees to display Sarah’s musical predilection, and Sarah encourages Ferny’s passion for Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life. Together they indulge their mutual admiration for young Red Whiskered Joe.
The efforts by some local notables to install a bell in the community to chime the hours and celebrate holy days, to civilise the landscape, is greeted with some skepticism by Ferny. A sinister campaign is then mounted to intimidate him. The push for the bell is, for Ferny, emblematic of the desire to change and destroy the natural environment, and to deny the injustices against the original inhabitants. This is a big, bold work: lyrical, powerful, challenging and rewarding.
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