Remembering Babylon Literary Elements

Historical fiction

Opening line: “One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast…”

Third-person point-of-view from the perspective of an external post-colonialist narrator.

The tone is fairly straightforward and journalistic, but the mood is unquestionably slanted toward motivating the reader to develop an emotional association with the indigenous Australians tribes and hold the white settlers with suspicion.

Protagonist: Gemmy Fairly, despite being white “adopted” into Aboriginal culture. Antagonists: the white settlers, specifically the inherent racism of the settlers toward the indigenous tribal members.

The novel is constructed around age-old conflict of culture clash with a little dash of nature versus nurture tossed in for good measure. Gemmy represents the epicenter of that conflict as a result of his occupying the worlds of both white and Aboriginal culture simultaneously without fully belonging to either.

The climax comes with Gemmy rejecting nature and white culture in order to embrace the nurturing of the Aboriginal community which effectively raised him.

The mysterious arrival of Gemmy out of nowhere into the white settlement foreshadows the climax of his story when he just as mysteriously leaves white culture behind to head back from where he came.

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Sir George is a pathetic figure who dreams big and continually underperforms. As such, he is the type given to delusions of grandeur expressed in mythic allusion to history: “He sees himself as a kind of imperial demiurge, out of mere rocks and air creating spaces where history may now occur - at once the Hesiod of the place, its Solon, and its antipodean Pericles.”

The imagery used to describe “whiteness” as Gemmy comes to understand it is remarkably visceral and insightful: “a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up. He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away.”

The overriding paradox of the novel is that though the white settlers are the one most often voicing fear of violence at the hands of the “inferior race” it is they who the only ones who actually resort to violence as a means of terror and intimidation, thus ironically subverting their claim to cultural superiority.

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“To keep his name before the Lords in Westminster he writes to one or another of them almost daily” is a metonym representing the full expansive power of the British upper house of Parliament, House of Lords which meets in Westminster.

The very first appearance of Gemmy to the white settlers is partially conveyed through the technique of personification: “It was a scarecrow that had somehow caught the spark of life, got down from its pole, and now, in a raggedy, rough-headed way, was stumbling about over the blazing earth”