Anyone who has lived in a country town, especially alongside a sizeable Aboriginal community, will recognise the nasty, thin-lipped strain of racism evident among the townspeople of Desperance. This is a town run by the pugilistic mayor, Stan Bruiser, and by a clutch of founding fathers, most of whom are named Smith. The local policeman, Truthful E’Strange, once a hardened Brisbane cop, is now so unused to police work, due to the diligence of vigilantes, that he has gradually converted the police station into an exotic indoor garden. Yet behind these broader strokes of farce, Wright works in the details that suggest the true roots of racism in Australia. The asides and insults expressed so often by the good citizens of Uptown as they sneer at the decrepit housing and the drunken immorality of the Pricklebush camps accumulate to expose naked fear and ignorance. This collective anxiety and irrationality reach a climax in the arrest and imprisonment of three young petrol-sniffing boys for the murder of a local white youth. They are later found hanged in their cell, among the carefully tended vines of monstera and ficus elastica.

The satire at the heart of Carpentaria is sharpened by Wright’s skilful characterisation. Initially, the parade of peculiarly named characters is somewhat off-putting. It is hard to resist the urge to treat the townspeople as caricatures, a series of wacky hayseeds. Soon it becomes apparent that a deeper aesthetic is at play, with many character’s names echoing the tensions between the literal and the ironic that recur throughout the novel.

Two of the most memorable of Wright’s creations are the characters of Norm Phantom and his estranged son, Will. Norm, the enigmatic elder of the Westside Pricklebush mob, lives with his wife, Angel Day, and their large family in a house ingeniously constructed from stuff found at the tip. Norm’s deep affinity with the sea is both spiritual and practical. He knows his country intimately, every current, every mangrove, every groper hole. He is also a gifted taxidermist, specialising in fish and crustaceans, painstakingly preserving them, tinting the shimmer of their delicate skin with his own home-made paints. Will, a mystic and a hardened guerrilla, wages a personal war with Gurfurritt, the large international company planning to build a lead ore mine just outside the town. Most citizens of Desperance are keen to do anything to attract the jobs and money accompanying the mining company’s business, and hate him for his efforts. There is widespread relief when he leaves town, driven out by violent retaliations at the hands of company goons. Some of the most tense parts of the novel depict Will’s life as a fugitive, dodging an aggressive and lawless enemy. Wright handles these scenes with great skill, carefully controlling the action, never surrendering to cliché or bombast. Will’s impatience and activism are pitted against the monolithic passivity of his father. By the novel’s end, both men have endured transformative spiritual tests, and arrive at very different understandings of manhood and their place in the world.

Carpentaria is that rare kind of novel which opens up an entire world to the reader, a place that is both familiar and strange. Wright expects her readers to work, to keep up. If you stumble and lose your bearings, you just have to trust the narrator and let the eddies of digression flow around you until you can regain your toehold. The rewards are plenty. It is the most exhilarating book I have read in a long time.