Summary
Everyday life in Desperance is disturbed when residents find the dead body of Gordie, the town watchman. The town clerk, Libby Valance, repeatedly rings the bell in a trance, until Mayor Bruiser shows up with Constable Truthful and stops him. Bruiser tells the townspeople that they have found evidence pinning the crime on three young, Aboriginal boys who are petrol sniffers: Tristum and Junior Fishman, the sons of Mozzie Fishman and Angel Day, and Aaron Ho Kum, the son of an Aboriginal women and the white barman, Lloydie Smith. The townspeople are revved up and urge the mayor and Constable to kill the boys.
Bruiser and Truthful arrest the boys, who are high on chemicals and sleeping in the shell of an old car. Bruiser beats the boys up very badly. After a while, Truthful urges Bruiser to stop, and finally pulls a gun on the mayor in order to achieve this. Bruiser and Truthful go to look for the boys’ parents in the hopes of getting more information. They arrive at Angel Day’s house, a gray, depressing building where they find no one and nothing. They destroy the home and go to the pub.
Kevin Phantom is quite drunk at the Black bar next to the pub. As Kevin leaves the bar, a car pulls up next to him. The boys inside the car ask if he wants a lift, telling him they’ll go have some fun. Kevin gets in and a group of boys with white hoods proceed to attack him violently. They press a knife into his neck, hit him repeatedly with a heavy object, break his bones, and drag him behind the car. Later, Truthful finds Girlie distressed as she holds Kevin’s limp body. They take Kevin to the hospital and eventually he is airlifted to the main district hospital 600 kilometers away.
In the days following the attack against Kevin, the Phantom children scold Truthful for not arresting anyone. Girlie becomes fixated on Joseph Midnight knowing everything about the attack. Meanwhile, Truthful starts seeing Joseph Midnight everywhere. One night as he is driving, he sees spider webs and spiders overtake his car. The spiders form the shape of old Midnight’s face. Truthful panics and barely manages to escape. In the middle of the night, he receives calls threatening him to stop investigating the attack against Kevin. In town, the fathers of the boys responsible for the attack boast of “putting a nigger down for Gordie.”
One night, Truthful dreams he hears a knock at his door, but when he goes to the door there is no one there. Turning around, Truthful sees that the police station is crowded with Aboriginal people who have gray skin covered with greenish sea slime. He becomes frightened and rushes to check on his three young prisoners. He finds the three boys have hung themselves and are dead. Days later, Desperance residents report a terrible stench of death coming from the police station, and Bruiser goes to check on the situation. He finds Truthful there, still bringing meals to the boys and putting their dead bodies to bed at night. Bruiser hatches a plan to catch Truthful.
Meanwhile, Fishman begins to see spirits everywhere around Desperance and he decides to leave town before the rains hit. He recalls what happened two years ago, when Will Phantom stopped the transport of ore from the mine to the coastline by blocking the pipeline of the mining company, Gurfurrit, in a dozen different places. Back then, many police flew in from the south to search for Will. When the Fishman convoy tried to cross the Normal river, police dogs attacked them and some people fell in. Will, who has a knack for being invisible, managed to slip past them. The police were frustrated when they could not find even one photograph of Will in all of Desperance.
Joseph Midnight wanders around town and continues to live in his decrepit, lean-to home. He insists that the brand new house that the government has given him due to his cooperation with the mine is “too good” to live in. Joseph is unforgiving of himself for deciding to send his daughter, Hope, and her son, Bala, away from Desperance, hiding them in Elias Smith’s boat the night Elias left town.
After Will leaves Elias’s body in Norm’s fishroom, he goes to take one of Joseph’s boats, with the intention of traveling to meet Hope and Bala. Joseph is waiting for Will so as to send him off with the best boat. Joseph teaches Will a long and complicated ceremonial song that provides directions to his people’s ancient homeland, where Hope and Bala are hiding out. Then Joseph explains that after Will left town with Mozzie’s convoy, the police started coming after Hope. They blamed her for the fires in town and believed she knew where Will was. Joseph says that he sent Bala with a note asking Norm to look after the boy, but Norm sent Bala away by throwing rocks at him. Will is doubtful about Joseph’s story and reflects on the long war between the two families.
Will heads out to sea. Following Joseph’s directions, he arrives at a series of islands with mangrove forests. For days, Will moves from one island to the next, facing severe rains and attacks from pelicans. He finds no signs of human settlement. Finally, at the last and largest island, Will sees plastic bottles surrounding the shoreline. Suddenly, he hears the voice of an Italian tenor singing. The man is extremely close and he is wearing the blue uniform of the mining company. Will, still unseen by the singer, is shocked at his own carelessness and he retreats into the bush. Suddenly, Will screams in pain and feels himself falling asleep. The next thing he remembers is being tied up on the floor of a helicopter. The noise is deafening. A man pushes his boot into Will’s back and rips the tape off his eyes. The door slams open and Will feels Hope’s body passing by his. Then he sees her fall down into the sea. Will tries to slither out to fall with her but he is unable to.
Will’s captors—two physically fit men around his age—bring him to the mine’s landing depot and tie him to a chair inside a large hangar. One man with blonde hair, Chuck, taunts Will and calls his higher-ups at Gurfurrit to brag about Will’s capture. Meanwhile, two men surveilling the area for Fishman’s convoy report the incident to Mozzie. Will catches a glimpse of them hiding in the grass, and he sees other men from the convoy far off in the distance. Suddenly, a large fire breaks out at a nearby hangar, and Will’s captors must leave to extinguish it. Two young boys from Mozzie’s convoy set Will free. Will wants to avenge his captors but Mozzie’s boys force him to run. Will’s captors chase after the escaping group. However, Chuck trips, splits his head open on a rock, and dies, while the other mine worker, Cookie, dies from lead exploding in his chest.
Another group of Mozzie’s men opens a hole at the bottom of the fence surrounding the mine. They carry Will and the two boys who freed him to safety. Then they hide behind large boulders and watch the fire spread, causing explosion after explosion. At one point the fire appears to be dying down. But then the first strong wind in days blows powerfully and the fire continues to spread with a majestic show of large and deafening explosions. Mozzie’s men are amazed and transfixed.
Analysis
In this section, the deep racism of Desperance residents is on full display. The author uses a sarcastic, ironic tone to expose and criticize the way in which racism and white supremacy operate in Desperance. One example is the town’s reaction to Gordie’s murder. The townspeople view themselves as upright, decent Christian people. They are shocked by Gordie’s murder, since “this was the sort of thing that only happened elsewhere in the mean, bad world, where the crazy people live.” However, the author frequently represents Desperance as just that: a place where mean, bad, and crazy people live.
This sort of behavior is on display when white boys from Desperance brutally attack Kevin, nearly leaving him dead. However, Desperance residents do not view this as shocking violence but rather as justice, since they feel they are evening the score by attacking a Black person. Moreover, their deep-seated white supremacy leads the townspeople to believe that the Aboriginal population is inherently inferior and that any violence against them is deserved and justified.
The narrator’s ironic, satirical description of Desperance residents’ attitudes highlights their hypocrisy and their double standards. It also sheds light on their biased, self-serving idea of justice. In this way, the author explores the themes of justice and injustice. The residents of Desperance decide to take justice into their own hands. They do not want interference from the southern police, who they believe serve a political elite that is far removed from the needs and interests of Desperance residents. In this case, taking justice into their own hands leads to the unjustified detention, beating up, and eventual suicide of three young Black boys, as well as the violent attack against Kevin. In this way, justice amounts to upholding white supremacy and maintaining the existing racialized social order. Police abuse and police violence are key tools for doing this.
In Chapter 11, the reader finally meets Joseph Midnight. The author presents Joseph as an alternate father figure for Will, who calls him ‘Pop’ and respects him. However, Will also questions the truth of Joseph Midnight’s claims, and he criticizes his entanglement in the old family wars with the Westside mob. More broadly, the narrator establishes a parallelism between the men who serve as father figures for Will: Norm Phantom, Joseph Midnight, Mozzie Fishman, and to a lesser degree, Elias Smith. When it comes to the first three men, the author characterizes them as knowledgeable and charismatic, at the same time as they are complex and flawed. All of the men are highly skilled at what they do. Each has a deep connection with the ancestral and spiritual aspects of their homeland. Yet the author also characterizes each man as complicated and flawed. Norm is a self-involved and negligent father. Joseph cuts deals with the mine and makes quick, sometimes bad decisions. And Mozzie is a self-involved womanizer as well as a negligent husband and father. Through these characters, the novel explores the theme of complex fatherhood, as Will struggles to understand his relationship with each man and to forge his own path.
Just as the reader finally puts a face to Midnight, the author finally gives a name to the mining company: Gurfurrit. In this section of the novel, the themes of corporate human rights abuses and Indigenous rights take center stage. Across the world, human rights organizations have documented cases of powerful companies that commit human rights abuses in order to extract natural resources and make a profit. Common abuses include violating Indigenous land titles and the right to prior consultation, as well as bribing community leaders and arresting, attacking, and even assassinating people who oppose the project. Too often, the police and the military protect companies and their projects rather than residents, who are disproportionately members of marginalized, and especially Indigenous, groups.
In this sense, many aspects of the novel’s portrayal of Gurfurrit’s abuses in Desperance are accurate. In this section, the reader learns that the mining company may have been responsible for setting the fires in Desperance, in an effort to divide and manipulate residents. Then, the national police show up to support the mining company, and their dogs attack Mozzie’s convoy, causing the deaths of Aboriginal residents.
These events are part of what Will calls a “new war on their country.” This new war is exclusively for money, and in this war, life has no meaning, there are no rules, and nothing is sacred. The destruction of the mine is Mozzie’s response to the war, which the author portrays as an effort to stem the tide of violence and recuperate the meaning of their lives and the sacredness of their land. The novel reaches its climax when members of Mozzie’s convoy destroy the mine, leading to the company’s definitive withdrawal from Desperance. The author highlights the significance of this climactic moment through the novel’s first use of the first-person plural pronoun, ‘we.’ As Mozzie’s men watch the dramatic and bombastic destruction of the mine, they become a ‘we,’ a group with a shared identity and mission that is strengthened through collectively watching a historical, life-changing event unfold.
