ALL OUR SHIMMERING SKIES
Trent Dalton
Fourth Estate
REVIEWED BY JESSIE NEILSON
Molly Hook is the ‘‘mad little gravedigger girl’’ tucked away in a pocket of 1930s Darwin. She and her parents are in charge of Hollow Wood Cemetery and while her mother Violet comes from curiosity-driven lineage with a penchant for fine literature, father Horace embraces ignorance as he does his moonshine.
Molly had been raised by her mother always to look up, to keep her eyes on the sky. Molly has made a promise to read poetry books and stay graceful, far from the role models she has in the real world. Darwin, with its wet and dry seasons and extreme landscape breeds only poverty, desperation and violence. Aubrey, with his erraticism and his ‘‘pitch black soul’’, is particularly a menace. She tries to blot this out by observing real beauty in nature, such as a black flying fox in the pre-dawn pink of a wet season sky.
However, all this changes when glamorous Sydney export Greta Maze arrives on the scene. She is a performer with a grand presence and she offers Molly a broader vision. As war approaches their very home and ‘‘blood flowers’’ bloom across the city, the two find themselves both on a quest to escape, and to make good on settling the curse placed on Molly's family decades previously by the mysterious Longcoat Bob. As the novel unfolds, events of a then-contemporary Darwin jostle for space alongside an increasingly-convoluted tale of mythology and adventure, with dastardly characters and deeds along the way.
Australian journalist Trent Dalton places together plot strands containing characters and their backstories which would at first seem anachronistic. Thrown into the story, for example, is the seemingly unlikely character of Yukio, a stranded Japanese pilot, who, like the author, is entranced by the terrain, noticing the small details of the flora and fauna.
Dalton is known for his multiple award-winning previous novel, Boy Swallows Universe. All Our Shimmering Skies, despite its obvious differences, likewise features a young Australian protagonist growing up against a challenging backdrop. Dalton knows his landscape well, and expounds at length on the descriptive. This is a great adventure story set against the arid, expansive lands of the Northern Territory, which frequently cause our parched characters hallucinations.
Neat coincidences and tidy connections do mean the reader must at times suspend disbelief. Therefore the novel should be enjoyed for the drama of the story rather than its particulars. And while descriptions of the landscape can become a little repetitive, they do add up to a well-rounded sense of place and time. Also of particular interest is the historical strand focusing on the Japanese bombing of Darwin, the majority of the city having to be rebuilt. Shimmering Skies overall is a spirited story: generous and immersive, a tale of greed and honesty, loss and perseverance.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant
