As I typed in the ISBN number just then I found myself thinking - why did I bother? Because Eucalyptus is not a novel you will have trouble finding. It is, on the contrary, one you may have had trouble avoiding for the last year.
It has been on the best seller list for yonks, and - by virtue of the author winning not only the Commonwealth Writers Prize (for which he got to meet the Queen - yippee) but also the Miles Franklin Award - has had more than its fair share of media attention. In fact, I’m willing to bet that at least half the people who read this review will already have read the book themselves.
Unfortunately this will make the temptation to talk about the ending very great but I will try to practice restraint. The rest of you should probably read it one day - it’s almost a social duty, like seeing the Star Wars prequel. If you don’t partake, you are cast into the fringes of modern culture. Where do I start?
Eucalyptus is an almost perfect novel. It is rare to see such an elegant combination of form and content, where the shape of the story (or stories, as it is more like a harmonious collection than a single entity) is echoed by its subject and themes.
For those of you who haven’t read it, Eucalyptus takes as its topic the tale of a man and his daughter who live together on a bush property. Holland (we never find out his first name) and Ellen make a complete unit, always a little apart from their western NSW town.
Ellen grows into the town beauty, which sets them even further at odds with the community, as her looks turn into legend and she grows aloof to survive. The descriptions of Ellen’s beauty are one of the chief joys of the book and take on an almost philosophical rapture:
“In the brief time when women wore little hats with veils screening their faces, like delicately crumpled graph paper, the little squares filled in here and there gave the face a random distribution of oriental birthmarks and moles. And Ellen’s speckled beauty resembled this veiled effect - protected, veiled, even in close up; a kind of provocative, insincere modesty.”
Holland’s obsession is the eucalypt - he has “an outdoor museum of trees” planted on the property, representing every species known to mankind. The descriptions of eucalypts are the other major feature of the book - readers will learn more than they ever thought they wanted to know about the diverse species and still enjoy it.
When Ellen comes of age, Holland marries his twin enthusiasms - his daughter and his trees - by setting suitors a task straight out of Greek mythology. The man who can identify every eucalypt on his property will win the hand of his daughter.
I was at first confused by the time frame of Eucalyptus. I thought it must be set in the past, where such old-fashioned notions as parcelling off your daughter to a stranger would sit more easily. I went looking for concrete examples of era. The mention of Japanese cars and iridescent motor cycle tanks were a bit of a give away - it was set in the present. But the ‘marriage offer’ device serves to give the novel a rare quality of timelessness, an epic sensibility that sits well with the spare, unhurried style which is the mark of Murray Bail.
The unfolding of the father’s plan continues in the mythic style - a suitor makes successful progress, a mysterious contender appears. Thus we reach the heart (or rather, the bones and sinew) of the novel. For each gum tree named, a story is told which picks up subtly on the character of each eucalypt. It is a masterful construction by Bail, allowing the beguiling magic of storytelling to do the work of seduction. It is a romance spun from the nature of narrative itself.
