Customer Reviews

Blueback: A Contemporary Fable

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Brilliant, touching, superb. Highly recommend to anyone who's human. Life changing.

This book was read on Montana Public Radio, and is a wonderful, moving story of nature, change, and humanity. Rich in its simplicity, profound in its beauty. Highly recommended.

The book "Blueback" by Tim Winton (1997) is an older reader novel, which narrates the story of Abel. The story begins when Abel is ten years old and ends when he is a grown man with a wife and a child of his own. The story explores universal human themes like love for family, passion, growing older and belonging; topics that readers about the age of ten could relate to in quite profound ways. At the beginning of Blueback ten year old Abel's world consists of the sea-diving in particular, and his mother, Dora. As he is diving he encounters a `strange' fish, Blueback:
At the corner of his eye he saw a blue shadow that blocked the sun. He whirled around to see a huge mouth and an eye the size of a golfball coming at him. The mouth opened. He saw massive pegs of teeth as it came on in a terrible rush. Abel screamed in his snorkel..."
Blueback's `strangeness' is a type of metaphor for Abel's burgeoning adolescence. He is ten and so therefore on the verge of that time in life where as the reader becomes aware, he meets with personal conflict and dilemmas as he begins to form his own views and values, discovering who he is and who he wants to be.
Indeed Winton uses metaphors of nature in a profound way throughout Blueback to demonstrate change in Abel's life. For example, as Abel grows older he "wants to know what the sea is about" yet as the reader discovers the `sea' Abel is about to discover is that of life, for just as the sea is a mystery waiting to be lived so is his life at his young inquisitve age:
"It was a mystery. And the more he thought about it the more the whole sea seemed to be a puzzle. Abel wanted to figure it out."
Abel leaves his home, becomes a biologist and travels through the world, gaining honours and achievements, yet in a `spiritual' sense he never leaves his childhood home at Robber's Head. It remains for him a source of belonging and love in the changing flux of his life.
Indeed, so important is the sea and Blueback for Abel that the fish is given human qualities. When for example there is a problem with the ocean, Winton places the humanness of the animal in contrast with the greed of the reefstripper "Costello" who loves the sea only as something of a giant supermarket, fit just for human consumption.
Through Abel then, Winton seems to be saying that although human beings need to use nature for survival it is more than an economic resource. As the wheel of Abel's life turns he meets the inevitable fact of death as his mother passes away, yet death is not final in Winton's story; Abel's love of the sea is renewed in the form of his three year old child who meets the giant fish, Blueback, just as he did as a boy, and so the cycle of love and wonder in nature is renewed in her.

Abel Jackson, who lives with his widowed mother on the coast of Western Australia, has always been in love with the sea. He and his mother dive for abalone to make a living, but they are always careful not to abuse nature in any way. From the age of ten Abel is friends with a huge groper, "as fat as an opera singer," whom he names Blueback. Years later after he has become a successful marine biologist "married to another marine biologist," he returns to the place where he grew up to care for his aging mother, described as not your average mother for she too loves the sea and its inhabitants and simply outlasts the developers intent on building a resort where she lives, complete with a hotel, golf course, swimming pool, a marina with the accompanying "rich tourists," "international entrepreneurs" and whalewatchers. All Abel's life he is intent on learning the "language of the sea."

Mr. Winton calls this extended short story "a contemporary fable" in which he says that we violate nature at our own peril. We can learn from the sea and its inhabitants by watching and listening. And greed is an awful thing.

This little volume is a great book for children-- and their parents.

An easy to read, fresh alternative to the 'usual' literature. Excellent description and portrayal (sp) of a different lifestyle. Top Notch Tim.

A glorious little book,to be read over and over

I hope someday to be a world traveler and Abel traveled the world