The Slow Death of Patrick O’Reilly
Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2001
ISBN 1 876044 36 5
What is it about?
From the back cover…
Patrick O’Reilly, it seems, has roamed the Tasmanian forests for 150 years. He knew Lake Pedder before it was flooded for hydro-electricity. A scourge of the local community, he has raided farms and apple orchards. But is he involved with a lost child? And with Bernard Laurent, a French sailor who has jumped ship? Bernard, having started an affair with a farmer’s wife, is sheltered by a collector of historical documents. She gives him a journal of an earlier Frenchman, a deserter from Nicolas Baudin’s 1802 naval expedition. The journal tells an almost parallel story of tenderness and brutality. Bernard’s translation leads to a startling and violent revelation.
Set across two centuries, Phil Leask’s compelling new novel is told with effortless ease.
Can we read some of it?
of The Slow Death of Patrick O'ReillyFrom Chapter 16
Patrick O’Reilly walked down the beach and cooled his toes in the water. For a week or more he had headed south, up through the hills and over the mountains and down through the forest to the coast where no one would ever be able to follow him. At last he felt safe. …
The ocean rolled towards him from Antarctica, huge, blue rollers that drifted in from half a mile out and smashed themselves to pieces at his feet. In a sudden rage, he waded out into the water and flung himself into the breakers, letting them toss him over on the sand and roll him along the beach like foam scattered by the wind.
Afterwards he felt better.
There was no point, he thought, drying his clothes by the fire on the beach, no point at all. This was no way for an old man to live. Age might well be irrelevant but it got to you in the end. It was one thing no one could fight against, even those who had immortality thrust upon them. He ate an apple and thought about it. He would clear some land, here at the back of the beach, and grow apple trees, and if that was not enough for him to eat, he would catch fish. He would find a way to do it. Plenty of others had done it before him and they had managed. Two days earlier he had caught a wallaby the way the Aborigines used to, driving it forward along one of its runs until it tripped on the grass loop he had tied across the path. It was simple enough when you knew what to do. And the fish, too, were easy pickings in the tidal lagoons. He might go mad, but he would not starve.
What would they do without him? No one would believe he had gone for good. They would search for him for ever, for ever seeking to put an end to him. He would be an old bag of bones on a beach and still they would not let him rest, his ribs sticking out of his sides like the stripes on the old tiger – the last tiger, he was sure – that he had seen lapping at a stream in the high country and sniffing at the air, as if it, too, was looking for Patrick O’Reilly.
Apart from the snapping of the fire, it was quiet on the beach. He pushed another log on to build it up; it was better company than the solitary eagle far above him.
He wished the Aborigines would come out of the bush and join him around the fire. He could not believe they had all gone away and left him. Sometimes he was sure he could see their dark shadows moving silently through the trees ahead of him, while the sounds of the bush were the sounds of them calling softly to one another, softly and plaintively, seeking forgiveness for wrongs they had never committed, searching for the meaning at the heart of the mystery that had burst so unforgivingly upon them out of a blue sky and a blue sea on a day no different from any other they had ever known.
Sometimes, he was sure, they joined him by the campfire as the night grew dark, to sing with him, and dance, and tell stories, stories as old as the seas whose arms had wrapped themselves around this island, freeing and imprisoning them for ever, the lost dark people who once hunted tigers in the mountains of Sumatra.
They had needed no sense of time or certainty of place; in the changeless pattern of the changeless years, they were there: by the shore, among the trees, in the mountains that belonged to everyone and no one. He closed his eyes and listened, hearing a distant chanting and the voice of a singer rising above the sound, but when he opened his eyes again it had gone, all of it had gone.
From Chapter 20
of The Slow Death of Patrick O'Reilly;a section from the diary of Clément Hébert,
December 1824
Once I lived with hope, until hope, too, became one of the words I no longer understood. To write is no longer to hope. To write is no longer to search for or believe in happiness. To write is to write; it is something I do, the way some men smoke pipes and others are unfaithful to their wives while yet others count their money or gamble it all away.
To write is to confess.
To confess to whom? Again the idea is laughable but contained within it is something to which I choose to cling. God knows, I have little enough to confess, except everything.
For reasons I do not understand, I have chosen to retain a conscience. What purpose can a conscience serve, when I have no sense of good and evil? Should I kill the birds and the beasts that cross my path? Should I treat the land on which I walk as the only God that has any meaning for me? I curse the wind that beats upon me on the high peaks, flinging into my eyes snowflakes as sharp as gravel, and the God who once forbade me to blaspheme does not strike me down or blind me with his wrath. This world in which I wander is mine and nobody’s and everybody’s, and we are all there is and ever will be in it, and when it comes to an end, for each of us or all of us, there will be no more. Nothing. And so to what purpose do I retain what I name as a conscience?
In order that I may confess.
Yet I seek no forgiveness, not even from myself. To forgive is to forget, and we have no right to forget.
When the snow came, I lived among the rocks near the eagle’s nest. The eagle made its anger known to me, but I did not move and nor did the eagle. Slowly we grew accustomed to each other. The eagle picked at the bones I scattered in front of my sombre cavern. When I spoke to it, it moved away, watching me, and in time it accepted my voice as it had accepted the bones, with indifference. Once I asked it if it lived in hope or fear. It gnawed at a kangaroo’s thigh bone, ignoring my laughter that rattled round the rocks like the echo of a distant storm. When the spring came, we abandoned each other without a second thought, the eagle and I, having other things on our minds.
Was it in the spring that I saw the farmer and his wife, planting seeds in the freshly-dug earth? She lifted her head and looked up at the sun, her hand shading her eyes. Behind them was a wooden hut that must have been their home. She spoke to him, words that meant nothing to me. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead and smiled at her and I heard her laugh. When I crept away through the forest, I gripped my knife in my hand with the blade facing my chest, and wished that I might trip on a root or a rock and fall upon it without knowing.
There are times when my mind wanders, and times when it is as clear as the blue sky stretching infinitely above me. It is then that I know I shall never be free.
What do they say about it?
Douglas Kerr, History and Theirstories: A Review of Some Recent Australian and Asian Fiction, Westerly V46, 2001
‘A myth of a different sort is at the centre of Phil Leask’s The Slow Death of Patrick O’Reilly (Black Pepper, 2001). There are three main strands to this intricately woven novel.
‘…"A country as young as this cannot have lost its history, not so soon," thinks Bernard (67). But there is just as much history as you want there to be. Patrick O’Reilly is the direct link with the past, with the earliest white settlement of the island, and with the state of nature; there is a story worth telling in his death.’
Terry Monagle, Tain Magazine, June-July 2001.
‘The most powerful personality in the book is the wilderness. As one character says: "It is a mistake to attempt to tame this land". This is a challenging thought. It comes at a time as Australians retreat from the bush they tried so hard to tame over two centuries.
‘So this book is, amongst other things, about the spiritual power of place, it’s about people trying to find lives which are livable, not because they tame the bush but because they find niches around the margins of it. It also focuses on the contradictory human need for both solitude and community. Each of the characters is a solitary traveller even when in a rapturous embrace. They hear two sirens singing contradictory allurements. Is this not our condition?
‘…This book made me look forward to getting into bed at night for that last half hour, that turning of the pages perhaps made from Tasmanian woodchips. Now, months after I have finished it, I can feel its myths and mythic perspectives roaming in my brain.’
Ivy Fleming, The Examiner 1.9.01
‘Phil Leask presents the intricacy of human nature in The Slow Death of Patrick O’Reilly… a compulsive read about all facets of life – including survival, love and family.’
Rodney Hall, launching The Slow Death of Patrick O’Reilly
‘… It’s interesting that time is so much a subject of the book. There’s a crossover of centuries. Leask circles around time and circles around the themes, and this gives you a sense of timelessness about time itself – it’s just that people drop off the twig every so often but time goes on.’
Want to buy a copy of The Slow Death of Patrick O'Reilly? Click here
Go back to...