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Oyster
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780393319361
ISBN: 0393319369
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: June 01, 1999
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
You won't find Outer Maroo on any map, and the people who live there intend to keep it that way. In Janette Turner Hospital's extraordinary new novel Oyster, this bleak, drought-stricken town in the Australian outback is home to a scant handful of religious fundamentalists and rowdy, gun-toting opal miners. United by their dislike for taxmen, the government, and "foreigners," the inhabitants have managed to keep their town's underground riches a secret from the world--until the day when a bloody, raving, but "quite strikingly beautiful" man staggers in from the desert and changes everything: "Then Oyster came, and quite soon after, jeeps began to announce themselves in small red clouds. There were campers and squatters, and they kept arriving as the zeros on the calendar got closer; or at any rate that was the connection that Oyster himself made, and the newcomers shared his belief, and so disposed themselves for a certain kind of future, now upon us."
In the weeks to come, the charismatic Oyster draws young drifters to his commune outside town, Oyster's Reef, where they become little more than slave labor in the Reef's opal fields. Seduced by his apocalyptic rhetoric or corrupted by his money, the town enters into a strange complicity with the mysterious guru, and anyone who dares to question the arrangement--including a local schoolteacher--conveniently disappears. Eventually, town and cult alike perish in a bloody firestorm that recalls events in Waco, Texas. Throughout, Turner Hospital expertly evokes the desert's shifting dreamscape, a land of pitiless light and heat where the atmosphere itself conspires to create illusion; narrated by a shifting cast of characters, moving back and forth in time, this eerie, hypnotic book often seems much the same way.
Janette Turner Hospital has been called by the Times Literary Supplement "one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today." Oyster has received critical acclaim internationally, and was short-listed for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and the National Book Award in Australia. Outer Maroo, a small, opal mining town in the Australian outback, is stewing in heat, drought, and guilty anxiety. Some ghastly cataclysm has occurred on the opal fields, but this is a taboo subject. At the heart of the mystery is the cult messiah, Oyster, dressed in white, sexually compelling, and preaching the end of time.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - "Anyone who finds this place is lost."
The people on the far side of the world in Outer Maroo, a small opal mining town in Australia, comfort themselves with a mantra: "if rain had come, things might have turned out differently". But the rains haven't come, the drought has. And the taciturn individuals who live in Outer Maroo watch as the foreigners arrive from all over in search of opals; then they disappear. With the Millennium approaching, a time of reckoning is on the horizon, awaited by Ma Berenson and Mercy Given at ... Read More
Rating: - Horrific or Sublime
OYSTER is a literary tale about the fictional town of Outer Maroo in the bush outback of Queensland, Australia. The 87 residents of Outer Maroo don't want "foreigners," a term that applies to anyone not already in Outer Maroo, because they have something to hide: the ghastly happenings thirteen months ago at Oyster Reef, a religious commune.
There are no oysters on Oyster Reef. Oyster is the name the cult leader gave to his self. There are opals there, though. Oyster Reef is not a ... Read More
Rating: - Oh, The Horror!
Near the end of the last century in a small Australian opal mining town named Outer Maroo, so obscure that it is not found on any map, Oyster, a mysterious religious cult figure, mesmerizes almost everyone in the community. (Only Susannah Rover, the teacher, and Charles Given of the Living Word Church and a few others were not drawn to him.) Obsessed with the idea that something of cosmic proportions will happen in 2000, many of the inhabitants of this little town at first buy into the sayings of this ... Read More
Rating: - Guilt, opals, armageddon & the Outback!
Set in Australia at the end of the 20th century, Oyster explores the hysteria & resulting consequences of end-of-the-world cultism. In hallucinatory prose, Janette Turner Hospital weaves flashbacks into the (almost) present-day story, as if one is drifting in and out of consciousness.
It is interesting to note that although Oyster is the name of the messianic cult figure who brings his followers to the (intentionally) forgotton mining town of Outer Maroo; he, as a character, does not figure too ... Read More
Rating:  - Waste if time
This 400-page story of Oyster kept me hoping for more. More of a plot, more of a specific reason for reading on, more details regarding the missing characters. The meat of the story could have been distilled into 60 pages. The rest of the book involved the author expounding on character descriptions that became boring in their redundancy and predictability. Don't waste your time with this book.
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