Moving backward through time, Natives and Exotics follows generations of one Australian family as they travel in and out of their native land, becoming "exotics" in faraway places. The first story belongs to Alice, a nine-year-old girl, living in Ecuador in the early '70s with her stepfather, an utterly soulless American diplomat, there to "help" the Ecuadorians, and her mother, vaguely wondering why she had married yet another insensitive man. Alice loves the sights and sounds and feel of Ecuador, but she longs for home. One night her mother talks about Australia. "But when Rosalind said it, there they were, the wattle, bottlebrush, snakes and Banksia man, the pebbled path beneath her feet, Grandma Vi with her thin freckled arms fanning herself with a palm frond. They all still dwelled inside Alice, near her ribs, like pain but not claimable, nothing."
Then it is 1929 and Alice's grandmother, Violet, is living in Adelaide with her new husband, Alf, pregnant with Alice's mother and struggling to pull a recalcitrant root out of the ground. "When she hit it with the side of her spade, the blow rang up her arm. All the same she would have this root. She would claim victory over this root." One native struggling with another for dominion.
In the third story, set in 1822, "English improvements were under way. The land was worth nothing with these Scots on it, so they were being uprooted and shipped over the sea, the land cleared for betterment, for sheep." It was the time of the Clearances, and Violet's great-great-grandfather George, heartbroken and desolate, leaves for St. Michael, a Portugese island in the Atlantic, and many years later, must move again to make way for more "improvements."
The poignant story of this family is one of unlooked-for dislocation, relocation, and homecoming. Here we see the first faint glimmerings of globalization, masquerading under the aegis of progress, re-purposing of land and resources, job creation and other euphemisms for the destruction of place and of people's lives. Jane Alison has captured, in pitch-perfect voice, the pain and confusion, bravery and resilience of generations of one family, striving to bloom where they are planted, in non-native soil. --Valerie Ryan
"What lucky country will be getting us next?" (Rating 4 of 5)
» Mary Whipple
"Exotics," a term often used to describe plants living in non-native environments, also refers, in this novel, to the main characters, since all of them also live in foreign environments. The Forder family, in the first of three major story lines, is on assignment in Ecuador in 1970, where the father works for the US State Department. Rosalind Forder, the mother, and Alice, her daughter, are doubly displaced since they are originally from Australia.
In the second story line, taking place in 1929, Violet Clarence (Rosalind's mother) is living in the bush in Australia, helping her husband Alf build a home in the bush. Because her family originally came from England, she has always regarded England as "home." Part III follows an earlier relative, a Mr. Clarence who is dispossessed of his land in Scotland in 1822 and moves with his foster son George to St. Michael in the Portuguese Azores.
In each of these three story lines, the "exotic," foreign residents permanently affect the natural environments in which they live--Mr. Forder by manipulating the fluid Ecuadorian political system so that American tuna companies can harvest at will in Ecuadorian waters; Violet and her husband through their work clearing land for farming and sheepherding; and Mr. Clarence and George through their importation to the Azores of exotic plants and new kinds of orange trees from around the world.
Alison clearly believes that despoiling a natural environment by removing or adding new plants and/or animals is dangerous and often foolish, no matter how honorable the motives, and she is even clearer on the subject of colonialism, both the old colonialism of the British Empire and, as she sees it, the more recent colonialism of the US. Mr. Forder's notion that "[Development in Ecuador] is not a matter of right...it's a matter of responsibility," is shown to have permanent, ineradicable effects, both on the natural environment and on the local people who inhabit it.
Alison never forgets that she is a novelist, however, and she never yields to polemics, softening her message through the love that some of the characters show for the environment and through sensuous, lyrical descriptions of immense beauty. Her depiction of geological processes and eras is so vivid the reader feels transported to a different world, making the contrasts effected by civilization more strongly felt. Her displaced characters and their difficulties in adapting to their lives humanize her themes, broaden her scope, and put man into a geological perspective--that of a relatively new but dangerous species which, one hopes, has the capacity to learn from experience. Mary Whipple
(Rating 4 of 5)
