Basin: A Novel

Scott McCulloch

Basin: A Novel
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Black Inc.
Country
Australia
Published
31 May 2022
Pages
192
ISBN
9781760643515

Basin: A Novel

Scott McCulloch

A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis.

Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn - a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.

Review

After poisoningand castinghimself into the sea,Figure is pulled from thewater and resuscitatedby a paramilitary banditnamed Aslan. Uponrecovery, the protagonistfinds himself in alandscape of societal rupture. A world of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violencepeopled by grifters and scavengers,gambling on blood sport and peddlingbathtub gin and snake oil. A dystopia oflate-stage capitalism devolving/evolvinginto a pre-industrial age subsistence underthe ominous shadow of war-lordship andundisciplined militia. Figure soondetermines that his saviour may not beserving his best interests.

The two characters part company,and Figure begins his largely peripateticventure through the maritime colonies ofthe basin, guided and or misguided by anensemble cast of characters, often no lesslost than he; hungry ghosts desperatelyhaunting a spiritual dust bowl. The voidfills with pagan practices and shamanisticdrug rituals: pickling of animal foetuses;sexual congress with forest-dwellingphantoms; mainline injection of raw fishextract. Figure’s ellipsis of transit throughthe basin queries the sense of meaning andattachment to the land one inhabits, as herubs shoulders with an army of lost soulsseeking a misconceived refuge.

In parallel, Figure embarks on a dizzyingtour of the spectrum of augmented anddiminished consciousness, from realitythrough illusion, disputing borders betweennightmare, fantasy and oblivion. As ancientwisdom and modern medicine concur, thedifference between poison and remedy isoften a matter of dosage, but hazardousis the quest. Atavistic and hallucinatory,jarringly visceral and deeply cerebral, thisis a stunning debut from Melbourne-bornScott McCulloch.


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