The Songlines, considered by many to be Chatwin's finest work, is the fictitious account of a journey taken through the heart of the Australian outback by two characters, Bruce, who is also the novel's narrator, and Arkady, an expert in the life and culture of the Aboriginal tribes of central Australian. Such would be one synopsis of this generically complex, thematically ambitious novel. The work draws in anthropology, ethnography, philosophy and theology to create a hybrid that can best be described as a meditation on restlessness - just as In Patagonia was a meditation on exile.
The work was a reappraisal of material collected in the course of writing The Nomadic Alternative, Chatwin's theoretical analysis of human restlessness that ultimately never saw the light of day and now resides in a folder at the Bodleian library. Thus, a central section of the work is given over to large scale quotation from the work of others - from Robert Burton to Pascal, from Konrad Lorenz to William Blake. This central section - entitled 'From The Notebooks' gives the work a sense of anachronism; the approach - though some would call it post modern - has something in common with the works of large-scale philosophic and theological speculation produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time when we weren't so sure of who we were and where we had come from.
Buy at Amazon
