Praiseworthy: why Alexis Wright’s ‘staggering’ epic is sweeping prizes – and challenging readers

When you talk to people about Alexis Wright’s latest novel Praiseworthy – winner of two of Australia’s highest literary accolades, the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin , as well as the Queensland Literary award for fiction and the James Tait Black prize in the UK – their eyes inevitably widen, and a kind of gobsmacked look takes over. “Epic” is a word that comes up a lot – or just “big”. At more than 700 pages, it’s not for the fainthearted. Those who finish it struggle to articulate the experience, their eyes cast heavenwards as if searching for the answers from a greater power. They describe it as transformative, even revelatory. Miles Franklin-winning Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch says it’s a book you feel “in all your nerve endings and your blood and your soul when reading it … It’s staggering in its scope and its themes.”

Related: Alexis Wright wins second Miles Franklin prize for Praiseworthy

Reviews have expressed similar awe: Astrid Edwards, writing for Times Literary Supplement , described it as a “mind-altering experience” that “retaught me how to read”; for Guardian Australia, Declan Fry wrote that “all life, as in Balzac, is here.” The New York Times declared it “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”. The book was also shortlisted for the prestigious Dublin literary award, nominated by librarians globally.

Beejay Silcox, a literary critic who chaired the Stella prize judging committee, describes it as “neural sherbet”. “You are lucky if [even] once in your career a book like this comes across your desk … I had that real fizz feeling of: I am looking at something that I don’t know how to talk about, I don’t know how to think about. And that doubt is the most exciting thing.”

Unfolding over 10 parts, each narrated by a different Oracle, Praiseworthy takes place in and around a lapsed “best Aboriginal Tidy Town” of the same name, overshadowed by a mysterious ochre-coloured “old grief haze”. Its residents, already ground down by more than 200 years of colonisation and aggressive assimilation policies, have been branded by the “Australian Government for Aboriginal People” (and a shrill national media) as paedophiles, alcoholics and neglectful parents. (Australia readers will easily recognise Wright’s target as the controversial Northern Territory Emergency Response, AKA the intervention, launched in 2007). Our hero is staunchly sovereign “culture dreamer” Cause Man Steel, who has a plan to get his people “through the century on the back of the burning planet” – with a little help from Australia’s five million feral donkeys.

The world of the novel is richly drawn, but the plot is light; rather than a linear narrative, the book follows a looping structure described by one reviewer as “relentlessly repetitive” . Wright’s long, convoluted sentences can sometimes make you feel like you’re riding a great serpent, holding on to her thread of meaning for dear life.

Introducing Cause, she writes:

“His stories were too much for a brain, rolling in stitches up there, like he was spinning some ancestor power, and you wanted him to stop telling stories like that, he got no business, but him telling them repeatedly all the same and never stopping, yep, right, like he was the national newspaper, or something called social media cancelling everybody else, and all the while only ever predicting nothing good would come out of a worldwide doom.”

Ivor Indyk, Wright’s longtime publisher at independent Australian press Giramondo, describes Praiseworthy as “challenging, and not just because of its length. I mean, the language is complex”. But he was confident it would find an audience, eventually – like her 2006 novel Carpentaria. Wright herself remembers how that book “was nearly not published at all, because of its style and the fact that it was an all-Aboriginal world that was being talked about. And for a long time, people would say, ‘Oh, this book is difficult to read’”.

It was Indyk who took a chance then – and it paid off; not only did Carpentaria win the Miles Franklin, but it has become a canonical work, beloved by readers and writers in Australia and abroad, and taught in universities and high schools.

Speaking to the Guardian, Wright concedes that her latest novel “may be challenging”, but she says its scale is necessary: “I wanted to write a book that talks about the spirit of the times, and I knew it would be a big book in more ways than one”.

She wanted to “come to some idea about how we might move towards the future” in the face of global warming. “We’ve got the greatest library in the world, in country,” she says, with a sense of wonder. “And you try to capture some of that in the writing of a book like Praiseworthy.”

I was trying to capture an Aboriginal rhythm – from our own world, in the way that people talk and understand things

Alexis Wright

The book also captures the pernicious ongoing effects of colonisation on any attempts, in Australia, to forge a positive future. Cause’s two sons, 17-year-old Aboriginal Sovereignty (who goes missing, presumed dead) and eight-year-old “bloody little fascist” Tommyhawk (who swallows the assimilationist Kool-Aid peddled by the mainstream media, and dobs his elder brother in to the police) are cautionary – tragic – examples of how white Australia often warps and breaks the same Aboriginal children it calls “ sacred ”.

“We [Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians] don’t seem to have that understanding of each other – and over 200 years, we’re no closer to understanding each other,” says Wright. “I wanted to show how complicated it’s becoming, and what happens to people when time and again wrong policy decisions are made … and how much harder it becomes to try to figure out a way forward.”

In the novel’s darkest and most excruciating sequence, spanning more than 50 pages, Wright compels the reader’s gaze as Aboriginal Sovereignty wades slowly into the ocean, ostensibly to drown himself. To counterpoint the tragedy, the author offers moments of startling beauty, raucous comedy and beguiling absurdity, too (pages are devoted to the various permutations of grey pertaining to donkeys).

Indyk says Praiseworthy is “more like an experience” than a story. “You’ve got to go with the sentence wherever the sentence goes – because it goes all over the place, but it hangs together. And that’s true of her plotline as well.” He says the key to the novel is “the rhythm and the voice”: “That’ll carry you. So even if you don’t [always] ‘get’ things, you can be confident that you’ll end up somewhere that you can understand.”

Wright, a Waanyi woman whose ancestral country is in the Gulf of Carpentaria, says: “I was trying to capture an Aboriginal rhythm – from our own world, in the way that people talk and understand things … We say in the Gulf, we’re of one heartbeat. And I thought, well, what is that heartbeat? What does it sound like? It seemed to me it was a slow beat. It’s an Aboriginal chord.”

She says the repetition in the novel reflects, in part, what she sees in country: “It’s a recurring, repetitive thing that you’re looking at; it’s changing, and it’s not changing.”

Silcox said that in grappling with the novel, she received a key piece of advice from fellow Stella judge Cheryl Leavy, a Kooma and Nguri writer: “[She said] you’ve got to hold it like you would hold a bird. If you try and hold it too tightly – if you try and pin it to plot or character, or allegory or realism or anti-realism – you’ll crush it. You’ve gotta understand that it’s got this heartbeat.”

Related: Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright review – how can one novel contain so much?

This advice forced Silcox to slow down and let go. “It felt like a massive antidote [to fractured focus], because you cannot read it and have a phone in your hand, you cannot read it and think about anything else, really. And that’s generous. You might say, ‘Well, it requires all of my attention’. No: it offers you a chance to get back to deep attention.”

In this way, Silcox says the book’s challenges might equally be described as gifts: “It’s the opportunity to be slow, it’s the opportunity to think big, it’s the opportunity to look deep. It’s all those big things that feel so impossible so much of the time. This book is an invitation to do them.”