Reviewlines

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So last night I finished up The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. On the surface, this is about Mr. Chatwin's trip to the Outback of Australia and his attempts to better understand the aboriginal people there, in particular the titular songlines that they travel across on walkabout. To be fair, he does discuss the songlines and the role they play in aboriginal society, but it's not a deep study. Instead, it's mostly about him bumming around in Australia hanging out as his guide to aboriginal society moves him along.

More than that, it's a meditation on travel and evolution and violence because about halfway through the book, Mr. Chatwin gathers all his collected notebooks and sits down to review them and compile some sort of grand statement on nomadic life in human history. What we get are the bits and pieces and fragments of those notebooks. They tell a sort of narrative, but only by virtue of Mr. Chatwin's curating and it's clear that the passages could be in any other sort of order.

Normally, I would be a little annoyed by a book that was so lazy about addressing it's supposed topic. If it had switched to a strong secondary narrative that might have redeemed it, but here it just sort of meanders off. Maybe the overall topic of nomadism allows and encourages this sort of free association. At any rate, I rather enjoyed the book despite wanting a little more insight into songlines and walkabout.

later
Tom

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, I've just been rereading the old Palladium RPG sourcebook Mutants Down Under, the Australasia pack for TMNT/After the Bomb. There are several quotes from Songlines in it, as the book seems to have at least vaguely informed the design of the game setting's aboriginal background mythos and pseudo-magic system (it's handwaved off as "psionics" because it's supposed to be a sci-fi game, but it's all pretty transparently mystical).