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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Taoism Downunder, June 14, 2004
Tourmaline is a crystalline mineral, but here it's also a fictitious town in outback Western Australia. The ruined remnant of a once vibrant mining community, its mix of white and indigenous inhabitants are now dependent on the weekly arrival of a truck bearing food and beer. Falling out of the passenger's seat one day is a badly sunburned and dehydrated young man who, on recovery, turns out to be the mesmerically handsome 'diviner', Michael Random. He claims he can bring water back to the town. Though some have their suspicions, he becomes the focus of the dreams and longings of many of the desperate townsfolk. When he demonstrates strange powers - finding a buried reef of gold; instantly quelling an orgiastic drinking binge - he is quickly deified and celebrated in the town's abandoned church with fiery rituals embracing both Christian and aboriginal theology. But, of course, the diviner is not quite what he seems, and it doesn't take long for the pitiless Australian landscape to undermine his authority... Stow is one of a number of Australian writers who turned to Taoism as an alternative epistemology for Europeans grappling with an intractable and alien continent. In this novel, he sets himself the difficult task of showing how it might apply. The difficulty is that the tenets of Taoism are notoriously inexpressible, so the argument must be made by inference. This might account for the irritated incomprehension with which this novel was received by most readers in 1963. Contemporary readers with no experience of Taoism will probably find it equally perplexing. Taoism is a world-view which can, to the Western mind, seem frighteningly nihilistic but is actually quite otherwise. Its 'virtue of non-contention' resolves the disconnection between oneself and a hostile world by acknowledging the Great Void and aligning the self with it. This is not nihilism, because the self is not obliterated. Nor is it solipsism. Taoism offers a way of being that renders the human serene and passive, at one with the indifference of his environment. Man becomes an element of Nature. There is no contention set up between the two, which is drastically different to the spirit of conquering imperialism in which most colonial cultures are forged. In the adaptive ways adopted by some of his characters - the narrator (the local cop, known as the Law), Tom Spring, Bogada and Dave Speed - Stow shows how Taoism might be usefully applied to Australian experience. Though the Law is attracted to the diviner's youth, beauty and promise of transformative power, there is an order of Nature to which he more naturally responds: one that runs truer than, and counter to, the obsessive imperialist desires for gain that Random represents. 'Tourmaline' is interesting not so much because it pits Taoism against the diviner's neo-Christianity in some kind of death match showdown. Rather, it shows the self-destructive impotence of messianic imperialism as a 'way of being' in this part of the world. Through the delicate use of symbols, the inner struggle of the narrator (and a rather indelicate precis from Tom at the end of Chapter 13), Taoism is allowed to declare itself in the wreckage that remains when Random's cult implodes. The novel isn't entirely successful, but it's an engaging and thought-provoking attempt at what is, perhaps, an impossible task - expressing the inexpressible.
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