Dusk by Robbie Arnott review – big cat hunters become the hunted in beautiful Tasmanian western

A few years ago, a friend told me a story. She and her husband had been staying in a remote area on the western slopes of the Blue Mountains. One day they were driving back to their house when a large animal appeared on the road in front of them. It was getting dark but she said the shape was unmistakable. It wasn’t a dog or some kind of native animal. Instead, the dark form that paused and then jogged across the road in front of them was unambiguously, inarguably feline.

Stories about escaped big cats – especially panthers – have roamed the outlands of the Australian settler-colonial imagination for more than a century. No doubt they have many meanings but it is difficult not to read them as a kind of haunting, another manifestation of the larger disquiet about the silences written into the Australian landscape and its history that animate the gothic underside of our culture.

In his fourth novel, Dusk, Robbie Arnott takes these myths and reimagines them with fascinating results. His big cat is not a panther but a puma called Dusk, the last of a group released in the Tasmanian highlands to control feral deer. As one of the graziers who are desperate to be rid of her explains at one point: “She looks like every other puma. It’s her personality that makes her dangerous … Dusk hunts every station, all terrains, in all weather. She favours sheep, but will take anything. Especially anything that is stalking her.”

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That final observation should be enough to warn off any would-be hunters. But for twins Iris and Floyd, the bounty is too big to ignore, so they make their way up into the mountains to try to track down Dusk and kill her. They are not alone in their quest: they soon discover that Dusk has just killed one of the men hunting her, while another, known as the Patagonian, who has come from South America to hunt her, has disappeared. But despite the danger the siblings head into the bush in the company of a third man, Patrick Lees, a slippery charmer Floyd distrusts and Iris finds disturbingly attractive.

Iris and Floyd are beguiling creations. The children of escaped convicts regarded as “killer-thieves … utter savages, the pair of them”, they are bound together by the shared experience of childhood on the run, and their parents’ drunkenness and unpredictable fits of violence. But although their parents’ criminality has left them outcasts, it has not made them hard or cruel. Instead it has created a bond of care that sustains them in the face of society’s disapproval.

Much of the magic of Dusk grows out of the writing. As anybody who has read any of his previous novels will know , Arnott has an astonishing facility with language, and his prose imbues the Tasmanian wilderness with an extraordinary, immanent beauty. In the highlands “rock and water … dominate the landscape: broken boulders, fields of snow, mossy stones, mirror tarns, and among it all little rivulets, trickling through the land as glassy arteries”. Currawongs are “large, sharp-beaked, with jackets of black, white tail feathers and fierce yellow eyes.”

It doesn’t seem accidental that the pared-back textures of Dusk’s prose occasionally recall those of Cormac McCarthy, especially in the book’s rolling sentences and their reliance upon rhythm: Dusk is self-consciously reinventing many of the tropes of the western in a Tasmanian setting. But while the twins’ quest and the machinations of the graziers and bounty hunters place the book within the western tradition, Arnott’s version of the genre is a surprisingly weird one.

While following a stream, Iris sees shapes rising out of the mist and assumes they are “abandoned fence posts, the remnants of failed farms”, or “dead trees, killed long ago and whitened by time”. It is only when she is among them that she realises they are in fact the “bleached bones” of prehistoric animals, “cold, random, alabaster. Ribs and limbs and hips, impossibly old, haunting the green life of the country, beckoning her west.” Later the twins shelter inside a huge skull high in the mountains.

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Evocative as these moments are, they sit a little uncomfortably alongside Dusk’s treatment of Aboriginal presence. Exactly when the book is set is never quite clear but it is clearly late enough for Palawa populations to have been drastically reduced: at one point they are said to have almost disappeared, although later Iris spends a day with a group of Aboriginal peat-cutters. Yet like the ancient leviathans in the riverbed, the novel’s First Peoples seem to belong to a mythical past, one separated from the present of the novel by an occluding gulf of time; certainly there is little sense of the genocidal hatred and violence that was brought to bear upon Tasmania’s Aboriginal peoples in the real world.

Simultaneously, however, this starkly beautiful and deeply felt book seems to want to move away from the elegiac mode of most westerns. It is interesting to contrast it with Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel, The Hunter, in which a man pursues a thylacine through the forests of western Tasmania. While the two novels share some of the same gothic trappings, they are very different beasts.

In contrast to the emotionally denuded and obsessional textures of Leigh’s novel, Dusk is a book about love: not just the love between the twins but the love they feel for the landscape and, surprisingly, for their dead parents. And, as their quest moves towards its conclusion, they find not loss and pain but instead the possibility of redemption and the “chance to assist in an act that went beyond their own survival. A chance to fix a wrong in the world, and in the process somehow fix a wrong within themselves.”

• Dusk by Robbie Arnott is out now in Australia (Picador, $34.99)