Albert of Adelaide | |||||
Howard L Anderson | |||||
Twelve, 240 pages | |||||
A review by Seamus Sweeney
Albert of Adelaide tells the story of the eponymous platypus, an escapee from Adelaide Zoo, and his adventures
in Old Australia, which he had previously idealised as a human-free paradise. Albert is haunted and infuriated by
memories of his captivity, and the perpetual eyes watching his every movement. Further back, his capture from a simple
life along the Murray River was even more traumatic.
The story begins with Albert, days march north from Adelaide, delirious and seeming ready to die. He encounters Jack,
a wombat who rescues him and becomes his companion of the initial part of the narrative; Jack gives Albert canned
sardines, makes camp with him, and clothes him. Jack also brings him to a remote general store/saloon called Ponsby
Station, run by Sing Sing O'Hanlin, a vicious kangaroo. Here Albert's strangeness both attracts the unwanted attention
of other customers and becomes a protective factor, setting a pattern for the rest of the story.
What follows is a curious tale of Albert's wanderings through the landscape of Old Australia, with various fauna as
anthropomorphised friends or antagonists, with his captivity and prior capture still haunting him. Howard L Anderson does a
good job of capturing some of the frontier spirit of Australia (it is somewhat difficult to work out when the
story is set) which remains, for all its cosmopolitan cities, a land of huge untamed territories. His prose
style is generally clear and engaging, and sometimes unobtrusively lyrical although the richness of the Australian
argot is rarely captured (the characters do sporadically deliver themselves of such Ozisms as "fair dinkum").
But what does it all add up to? Unlike Watership Down, to which the book is compared on the blurb, Anderson does
not construct an elaborate platypus-centred world view, and with the animals wielding guns, operating saloons
and toting backpacks there is no claim to any kind of natural history verisimilitude of even the most rudimentary
kind. The characters occasionally indulge in observations on "difference" and "otherness" which are uniformly
trite, and Albert's self-reflections similarly fall flat. Albert is something of a cipher; one feels that
Anderson intends him as a sort of accidental picaresque hero but his characterisation is not developed
enough. There is a pointlessness about the whole endeavour which ultimately left me rather cold.
Seamus Sweeney is a freelance writer and medical graduate from Ireland. He has written stories and other pieces for the website Nthposition.com and other publications. He is the winner of the 2010 Molly Keane Prize. He has also written academic articles as Seamus Mac Suibhne. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide