Oyster [Paperback]

Janette Turner Hospital (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

Janette Turner Hospital has been called by the Times Literary Supplement "one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today." Oyster has received critical acclaim internationally, and was short-listed for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and the National Book Award in Australia.

Outer Maroo, a small, opal mining town in the Australian outback, is stewing in heat, drought, and guilty anxiety. Some ghastly cataclysm has occurred on the opal fields, but this is a taboo subject. At the heart of the mystery is the cult messiah, Oyster, dressed in white, sexually compelling, and preaching the end of time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You won't find Outer Maroo on any map, and the people who live there intend to keep it that way. In Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary new novel Oyster, this bleak, drought-stricken town in the Australian outback is home to a scant handful of religious fundamentalists and rowdy, gun-toting opal miners. United by their dislike for taxmen, the government, and "foreigners," the inhabitants have managed to keep their town's underground riches a secret from the world--until the day when a bloody, raving, but "quite strikingly beautiful" man staggers in from the desert and changes everything: "Then Oyster came, and quite soon after, jeeps began to announce themselves in small red clouds. There were campers and squatters, and they kept arriving as the zeros on the calendar got closer; or at any rate that was the connection that Oyster himself made, and the newcomers shared his belief, and so disposed themselves for a certain kind of future, now upon us."

In the weeks to come, the charismatic Oyster draws young drifters to his commune outside town, Oyster's Reef, where they become little more than slave labor in the Reef's opal fields. Seduced by his apocalyptic rhetoric or corrupted by his money, the town enters into a strange complicity with the mysterious guru, and anyone who dares to question the arrangement--including a local schoolteacher--conveniently disappears. Eventually, town and cult alike perish in a bloody firestorm that recalls events in Waco, Texas. Throughout, Turner Hospital expertly evokes the desert's shifting dreamscape, a land of pitiless light and heat where the atmosphere itself conspires to create illusion; narrated by a shifting cast of characters, moving back and forth in time, this eerie, hypnotic book often seems much the same way. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A rank, festering smell hangs over the desolate Australian Outback town of Outer Maroo, so isolated that it can't be found on any map of Queensland. The smell, which the town's wary inhabitants call Old Fuckatoo, is engendered by the corpses of animals dead in the lingering drought?and something more mysterious and horrible, "the feral stench of hate." Dreadful events, carried out under the mandate of religious fundamentalism, have occurred here , but no one dares to refer to them, or to the charismatic cult leader who called himself Oyster and whose acolytes worked like slaves mining opals and serving Oyster's insatiable sexual appetite. Oyster and his followers disappeared in a wave of violence unleashed by evil Dukke Prophet, a member of the churchgoing community of the Living Will, and ever since, no strangers have been allowed into town to look for their missing loved ones. The Bible-quoting, hypocritically sanctimonious Prophet deposed the Living Will's mild pastor and demanded fire and brimstone in the name of salvation. Prophet, a lecherous rancher named Andrew Godwin and the proprietor of the town's only pub are making millions in illegally traded opals while cowing the town's inhabitants and accumulating massive armaments. Armageddon beckons. Part of the seductive power of Hospital's novels (The Last Magician; Charades) lies in her practice of constructing the plot in a series of interlocking narratives, like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Here, much of the action is filtered through the thoughts of Mercy Givens, the young daughter of the deposed pastor. Mercy's precocious but innocent mind resists the full meaning of the brutal acts that finally engulf the community. She and the others in the beautifully observed cast of characters?a schoolteacher doomed because she tells the truth, the parents of two missing cultists, an Aborigine woman, two of society's outcasts who have tried to forget their pasts?gradually reveal the terror of people held under the iron fist of religious fanaticism. As the chilling truth becomes more clear and as the suspense mounts, Hospital creates her most powerful and dazzling novel to date. In sensuous prose, feverish with the cadences of mystery and doom, sometimes hallucinatory but always meticulously controlled, she spins a story eerie in its timeliness and credibility.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition. first thus edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393319369
• ISBN-13: 978-0393319361
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A mesmerizing book, August 31, 1999

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)

OYSTER is a mesmerizing book about secrecy, complicity, and the power of personality. Outer Maroo isn't on any official Australian map; it is an insular world where foreigners arrive but never leave. The people in this small, rain-starved town all know a secret of which they can't speak, even among themselves. When Susannah Rover, a teacher brought in from Brisbane, dares to speak the unimaginable, she sets off a series of events leading to the ultimate disaster. Janette Turner Hospital has an unfailing ear for language as she paints the outback with opal veins, mirages, roughnecks, and the followers of Oyster himself, a guru who arrives soaked in blood and carrying three priceless opals. While this book is not a page-turner, Hospital's descriptive language and poetic eye create an Outer Maroo that feels both mythical and real. This book lingered in my thoughts long after I finished reading.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, The Horror!, August 23, 2004

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)

Near the end of the last century in a small Australian opal mining town named Outer Maroo, so obscure that it is not found on any map, Oyster, a mysterious religious cult figure, mesmerizes almost everyone in the community. (Only Susannah Rover, the teacher, and Charles Given of the Living Word Church and a few others were not drawn to him.) Obsessed with the idea that something of cosmic proportions will happen in 2000, many of the inhabitants of this little town at first buy into the sayings of this stranger, dressed all in white and with "limpid blue opalescent" eyes. He is a most persuasive speaker: for example, "I will make you a fisher of opal. . .if you follow me." Later two strangers arrive in the village, looking for a son and daughter, who have mysteriously disappeared and who (they believe) were under the spell of Oyster. While Ms. Hospital's gifts as a storyteller are magnificent, it's hard to know if she was influenced by say Jim Jones and Jonestown in 1978 when 913 of his followers apparently committed suicide or David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in 1993 when 80 or more people perished. There are certainly parallels to be drawn as Ms. Hospital's subject obviously is timely. We had Heaven's Gate in 1997 when Applewhite and over 30 of his followers committed mass suicides. A cult figure in Georgia was recently convicted of sex crimes against children, and other religious crazy groups-- I personally know of one in Florida-- pop up like dandelions in the spring. This book says so much about religious extremists, sexual depravity in the name of God, mob psychology, and the nature of evil-- and hope too but only in lower case letters. Ms. Hospital, however, is somewhere way past Joseph Conrad and Nathaniel Hawthorne, just to name two writers obsesssed with the darkness of the human heart.

The author tells a wonderful tale and is as good as any writer I can think of at building suspense and dropping clues along the way as the story builds to a devastating climax. Although her prose is dense and chock-full of Australian words and phrases, she is not a difficult read. She does beautiful and totally accurate things with words, making a verb out "trampoline", for example. Mercy Given, with a transparent name, describes saints in the DICTIONARY OF GREAT PAINTINGS OF THE WESTERN WORLD as "the people with golden saucers stuck to their heads." When one character smiles, his smile does not reach his eyes.

Someone writing for the OBSERVER noted that Ms. Hospital is "one of the best female novelists writing in English." I disagree. She is one of the best novelists writing in English.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Horrific or Sublime, November 13, 2004

By 

Gregory Bascom (San Jose Costa Rica) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oyster (Paperback)

OYSTER is a literary tale about the fictional town of Outer Maroo in the bush outback of Queensland, Australia. The 87 residents of Outer Maroo don't want "foreigners," a term that applies to anyone not already in Outer Maroo, because they have something to hide: the ghastly happenings thirteen months ago at Oyster Reef, a religious commune.

There are no oysters on Oyster Reef. Oyster is the name the cult leader gave to his self. There are opals there, though. Oyster Reef is not a reef. It is way out in the outback beyond the end of the rail line, off the map. To get there, you'll need a four-wheel drive, extra petrol tanks, spare vehicle parts and a driver who knows the bush country. Foreigners can't buy round trip tickets, however.

The story begins when two foreigners, one from Melbourne and another from Boston, arrive in Outer Maroo, at high noon on Monday, looking for their young loved ones who were mesmerized by Oyster. From there, the author cleverly interweaves story and back-story, gradually untangles her characters and ultimately unravels Outer Maroo itself, all in a week's time.

OYSTER is the best work of literary fiction I can recall reading, and is more engaging than most of the genre and commercial fiction I've read. The prose crackles, the characters are vivid, the pace is precise and there are tasteful flavors of suspense, mystery, sci-fi and spice.

Janet Turner Hospital was born and raised on the steamy coast of Queensland. She knows the terrain, and the lingo too. Oops, there's a little problem there. Even if you're a reader adept at sliding over unknown words and pressing on, you still might feel you missed the lay of the land. I catalogued 46 words peculiar to Australia, New Zealand or Great Britain. Does your Ute have a roo bar or a bull bar? Did you ever go noodling through mullock or potch? You would know that a Jackamara woman would be tough, wise and ironic if you've read Mudrooroo, an aboriginal novelist. Did you ever eat barbequed jumbuck, charred goanna strips, fried emu eggs, or fire-toasted damper? That's all tucker. At least you should know about bora rings and corroborees that those Wankumara do (a.k.a. Wanggumara, Murii) and bore-water too.

There are fine threads about mirages and powerlessness in OYSTER, but the tightrope is cult religion, which stretches from the likes of Jonestown and Waco to Oyster Reef. Janet Turner Hospital writes succinctly. Religion, like sex, can be horrific or sublime.