Dusk

Peta's Review 

I had no hesitation in immediately picking up Robbie Arnott’s latest novel, Dusk, as soon as it arrived in the bookshop. For me, Arnott is one of Australia’s best writers; the number of awards his books have received supports my rather bold claim. His debut novel Flames (2018) was longlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award, and nominated for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. Arnott was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. His second novel The Rain Herron (2020) won The Age Book of the Year Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Limberlost (2022), his third novel, won The Age Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2023 Voss Literary Prize. It was also longlisted for the 2024 International Dublin Literary Award. I rest my case.  

At the heart of Arnott’s fourth novel, Dusk, are the twins Floyd and Iris Renshaw. Raised by drunken convict parents and orphaned at the age of seventeen, Floyd and Iris are now in their early thirties. They have had to learn to survive by whatever means possible. The key is their fierce protectiveness of each other, an unspoken vow taken as they watched their parents drowned by the ferocious river rapids. Both characters are shown as tough, resourceful and capable. In many respects Iris is the stronger, because her brother suffers daily from a past injury. However, he is also keen-eyed, alert to any approaching danger. When news of the huge bounty on a puma reaches them, they both see this as a chance to make enough money to provide them with a more secure future. So they set off to hunt the last remaining puma, known widely as Dusk. 

Arnott’s new work has elements of a western, an antipodean gothic, a quest narrative and a historical novel. While some critics have described it as a colonial novel, Arnott has left its historical setting ambiguous, allowing Dusk to speak to and engage with several mythical narratives. The most obvious are the stories of Tasmania’s last Thylacine and the violence of Australia’s colonial past. Arnott also subverts a realist notion of setting: the Tasmanian landscape that many of us will recognise - fossilised bones, pumas, black cockatoos, deer, kangaroos, and a Patagonian hunter - becomes suspended in a place, as well as a time, of our own imagining, affirmed by the novel’s conclusion. Once the puma is caged and the bounty hunters begin scrabbling for their weapons and shouting warnings, Iris closes her eyes, steps aside, lifts the latch of the cage door and rips it open. This beautiful ending asks us to reflect not only on the immediate situation but also on our capacity to love, our ongoing fight for survival, the endurance we need to grow, and the preciousness and fragility of the environment.

I am firmly on the side of ‘Team Puma’. I know it is an old cliché, but do yourself a favour and read this wise and lyrical novel. 

Publisher's Review 

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal. 

'Dusk is a sublime novel of loss and redemption, fight and surrender, that left me in absolute awe. Robbie Arnott's prose is incandescent, his storytelling mythic and filled with a wisdom that extends beyond the page. With Dusk, he asserts himself as one of Australia's finest literary writers.' - Hannah Kent

'Magnificent' - Tim Winton