AustLit

This review describes Carpentaria as a political novel that is also personal. It discusses the novel's style and argues that '[t]he narrative voice of Carpentaria is a storyteller’s voice; its narrative context, an eternal present as lived by a community for whom history and myth are interwoven. Just as the serpent is both the region’s river system and the totemic RainbowSerpent of Aboriginal creation stories, so the novel occupies two parallel time zones, or streams of activity, one linear and the other part of an infinite spiritual cycle’ (Source: review.)